Systemd Discussions--The Good Parts

To: debian-project@lists.debian.org

Cc: josh@joshtriplett.org

Subject: Systemd Discussions--The Good Parts

From: Sam Hartman <hartmans@debian.org>

Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2014 05:10:13 +0000

Message-id: <[🔎] 00000149c14ee38f-a053cba2-c3d4-4d77-8e07-0cf8b47931b5-000000@email.amazonses.com>

In-reply-to: <[🔎] 00000149848a80be-dc97ee50-2a82-472d-a801-a2baefa782b1-000000@email.amazonses.com> (Sam Hartman's message of "Thu, 6 Nov 2014 09:58:29 +0000")

References: <[🔎] 00000149848a80be-dc97ee50-2a82-472d-a801-a2baefa782b1-000000@email.amazonses.com>

I've tried to slow down my rate of posting both because I've said what it was useful for me to say and because after the most recent IETF meeting I've been taking a vacation in Hawaii, meditating floating in the ocean and living in the moment laughing with joy as the salt spray soaks my body. I'll be flying back to the continental US shortly after the GR results are announced and it will likely be 36 hours after the announcement that I'll be done with flights, home, caught on on $day_job and back to Debian mail. However, I do have one thing it might be useful to say now. There have been some really amazing moments in this whole systemd discussion. There have been moments where I've been really proud to be part of debian and reminded that this is why I love this community; this is why I'm here. Sadly, there have been other moments too with more negative emotions. The first was reading https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?msg=3410;bug=727708 . Many of us recognize that bug number, but that particular message was Ian's message "On Diversity." In that message he talks about how he wants Debian to be a place where each of us can come to work on our priorities and have an opportunity to try and succeed at what we believe as important. He wants Debian to be a community where we can be trying different approaches and where people have an opportunity to succeed even when others in the project don't (yet) see the value in your goals. I think we've all benefited from this. We had something we wanted to accomplish, and it wasn't clear we'd succeed, or sometimes even whether it was a good idea. However Debian was a place where we could try and see if it worked out. If we attracted other like minded folks and the idea proved good, we succeeded. If not, perhaps the idea floated into obscurity. I recently re-read this as I was writing a blog post about this discussion. I was jumping around my hotel room, filled with the joy of that vision. i think Ian's vision in that post is similar to what Joey talks about when he talks about the importance of iterating on decisions and refining things. I think it's similar to what Russ talks about when he points to Joey's message and talks about finding what's fun to work on and doing that. I think it's wonderful that even when people disagree with the approach very strongly, there can be so much that they do agree on. Joey's dislike of process and governance is very different than Ian's formal attention to making sure he correctly amends and then accepts/rejects his amendments to work within the formalism of our constitution. However, I would be unsurprised if they both have valued Debian as a place where people can work on what's important to them. Another Yes! moment was reading Russ's mail about the challenges of the TC decision--the one where he pointed out what it was like to make decisions you cared about with people you respected when there was a lot of emotional connection to the decision. You know, the one that got cited everywhere and that was probably a significant part of why we all rewarded Russ at debconf. It's great that Debian has folks like that, and I aspire to meet the level of compassion, empathy and commitment Russ showed in that post. When I got to the hack lab at Debconf this year, I met Josh Triplett for the first time. He was running around talking about the joys of systemd. It's safe to say that Josh and I have different values surrounding gentle, phased transitions. Josh seems to value having one simple way to do things. I was starting to wonder if "O, hey is that what the annoying systemd folks are like...I see why some people are frustrated." However, I wasn't sure; Josh was talking to some other folks who shared similar values. Fortunately later in the conference I actually got a chance to interact with Josh. We went to dinner, where Josh was trying to work with the ifupdown2 proponents to understand how their technology differed from/interacted with networkd. I was pleased that he cared about understanding others use cases and cared about helping explain the value of his proposed solution. On the walk back to the dorms, I talked to him about concerns resulting from some of his comments about kdbus. He had reasonable answers for all my concerns including discussions of HURD and KFreeBSD. He cared about the points I brought up and was willing to revise his approach when he ran into trouble. It's great to brainstorm with folks like that. You may not agree but the result will be stronger than either of you could get alone. Finally, there's the discussion between Josh and Ian in the bug about the libpam-systemd dependency. It was nice to see Josh and Ian working together to refine that decision to be accurate, and to be more clear. I think to move forward we'll need to see more of that cooperation between people who disagree strongly. I'm probably missing some other moments in all this where the community really showed its depth and strength. I hope for more of that in the future. We are amazing when we choose that path.