The wisdom of crowds. Apparently, it mostly depends on the crowds in question.

Thursday, 20 November, Year 6 d.Tr. | Author: Mircea Popescu

As you may or may not knowi, the SystemD & USG vs Sanity, Freedom & Everything Niceii debate came to a head yesterday, at a GR vote in Debian.iii

I was fully expecting for the lot to just give in and accept their "salvation", such as it is. This is, generally speaking, a safe bet, and in the immortal words of Casper "I'm a sporting man. I like a sure thing."

Then the vote came out, and people seem to agree :

decimation Speaking of which mircea_popescu so you called it with the debian GR re: systemd, they 'voted' to make init scripts 'optional'.
mircea_popescu Aha. I was merely following the hints.

asciilifeform They actually voted for surrender to enemy, because that is what 'meeting halfway' is. 'Camel's nose' etc. Achilles said to tortoise, let me stick the cock in halfway. And then again halfway. Again. (recurse)
decimation I don't blame Red Hat et.al., like Larry Ellison, they are just exploiting what they can exploit.
asciilifeform Lest anyone think tortoise gets nothing from this deal - think again. He gets to derp in front of the other cartoon animals, that - even while his shell is bursting from megacock thrust - that nothing at all is happening. Because it isn't really "in". Or something like this.
mircea_popescu Well, in truth the entire "free software" thing was dead a while back. So the remaining pretenders don't manage to cling on to the shoes of their forebears. This should be shocking or what ?

But I must confess that I've spent some time with this issue, and am not nearly as sure what we've seen there is any kind of surrender. Consider yourself : why is money attacked by the socialist horde ? Because there's something there to attack. The correct solution, then, is to make banking optional, and issuance immutable. What, if you consider the issue with due seriousness, would in your estimation be the difference between the Bitcoin solution to "socialists want to spend your money" and the "optional init scripts" solution to "socialists want to improve your computing" ?

Poettering & the rest of the shitgnomes are doing SystemD rather than whatever atrociously unusable sound server or whatever it is they do under their rock. Why ? Because they think it's important, right ? They, like the whole rest of the EOLiv retardsv of their generation seek the light of the stage. But this begs the question, why exactly is SystemD important at all ?

The obvious answer, at least to me, seems to be... "init scripts aren't optional". You have to pick a particular system and you're stuck with it. That's what Poettering & the rest of the shitgnomes are doing here : they are seeking "now I can get fat" aka marriage. With you, on your dime. Hey, it worked for their mothers, right ? And they were raised by a pack of rabid wolves their mothers, so they aspire to become... their mothers. Except they're not waitresses and pedicurists, trying to get pizza, beer and pot money. They're smart kids, don't you know, so they'd like your intellectual welfare. They'd like to "change the world" by means of you know, being in your workspace. Whether you want them or not (hey, the feminine guile!!! they gots it!!1), and whether you think they suck or not. They just want to be there. Like the women that spawned them, to a t.

The solution found at the GR seems to me cruelly exact and quite on point. Kids that failed to mature are trying to use your thing to mature against ? Remove the parts in question. Ideally implemented, the GR vote results in a situation where no program can rely on aforeknowledge as to what sort of init scripts it is going to encounter in the wild.

Some will choose the monolythic approach and assume anyway, Windows style. One of these may even be propped by the full "faith and credit" of the USG, such as it is these days. Which propping costs money, and which expenditure makes - in typical USG manner - exactly no difference : the entire lot is doomed to failure.

Some will choose the linux way, and this is really the point of this GR, as well as any other, as well as Debian in general and sanity altogether : that the right way may survive. There's no aspiration, indeed there could never be any aspiration to make the right way the only way. The only plan is for it to survive indefinitely, so the Poettering infantile minds of tomorrow have something to be wrong against then, too, while the rest of the people - those five or five dozen or five hundred people that actually matter - can go about living their life.

———
  1. Like from instance from my anger at that Sam Hartman fellow. []
  2. Socialists want to "save" individuals that don't need any saving by recourse to "the group". Individualists don't care about any random nut's notions of what "the group" is or what its putative normatives would look like, and expect all inviduals to save themselves, if such a thing is desirable or for that matter possible.

    That's right : it is not a "political" debate. It's a religious debate, in exactly that ancient manner. At issue is "salvation" and generally speaking interaction with the metaphysical - the scary, the unknown, the au-delà. And yes in this context Sam Hartmans paralogies make a lot of sense, in the sense that they fit well in the context, much like puss fits with septicemia. That doesn't make either puss or Hartman (should someone find a way to distinguish between puss and pustule) the right thing, but quite wrong. So, so very wrong.

    Turns out you were wrong to think magical thinking had been somehow "defeated". This is not possible in practice, magical thinking is intellectually cheap. Always, always cheap, and men - reasonable men even! - will try the reasonable approach just as soon as all cheaper alternatives have been exhausted. []

  3. In fairness, it's been brewing for over a year by now. []
  4. English as an only language. []
  5. I blame the parents. You really should be very, very ashamed of yourselves, people. []
Comments feed : RSS 2.0. Leave your own comment below, or send a trackback.

17 Responses

  1. This was a desperate try to overturn the technical committee vote, and it didn't work - at all.

    As it turns out, the people who actually maintain packages - the people who actually make Debian and not some random wankers - want systemd and don't want those marvelous shell scripts. By the way, the votes are public.

    It is also never written "SystemD" but "systemd".

  2. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    2
    Mircea Popescu 
    Friday, 21 November 2014

    The "random wankers" aka the users are the only power on this field. The actual wankers, aka "people who actually can't sling dope" are entirely inconsequential in this discussion, if they all miraculously found girlfriends tomorrow we'd take two weeks to notice.

  3. The phenomenon pankkake is speaking of is called (by the perpetrators) - 'do-ocracy.'

    That is, a number of folks have positioned themselves into being seen, at least on the surface, as 'those who actually make Debian' and therefore are, to use G. W. Bush's term, 'the deciders.' Elementary meatpuppetry in action - want to be 'decider?' throw in Moar Code. Form 'imperium in imperio' clique, pull each other's dicks, undesirables (old guard) get euchred out. Rivers of meat, 'victory.'

  4. Stan,
    So in fact no Jon Galt is needed to lead the doers away, the wankers are just gonna push em out. Might be a good thing at that.

  5. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    5
    Mircea Popescu 
    Friday, 21 November 2014

    So this would be like what exactly, USGavin pooh-poohing Satoshi, the only guy involved so far with Bitcoin that actually did something useful. Then further pretending like the cruddy, makeshift "implementation" that's really a very shoddy prototype which only happens to exist because Satoshi was trying to breach the Al Gap is "the spec" strictly because that readily maps to "USGavin is important" and so on and so forth ?

    Oh but I'm so very impressed, for all values of being impressed that reduce to 0. Vaguely related,

    And while I’m setting the record straight, the original (TECO-based) Emacs was created and designed by Guy L. Steele Jr. and David Moon. After they had it working, and it had become established as the standard text editor at the AI lab, Stallman took over its maintenance.

    Could this be called "Stallman's legacy", then ?

  6. Seems just spillover from academia. Kids that didn't get tenure / didn't think they can get tenure / not smart enough to phd trying to import "publish or perish" and generally the worst parts of academia into the one field where there's no barrier to entry.

  7. There has been a lot of talk about "forking" but no end results. So, we'll see if the end-users actually want to commit resources on not using systemd.

    My prediction is that those will be either too poor or too unqualified to do it, and this will show again that free software is a do-ocracy, not a democracy.

    Yet, the dependency on systemd is greatly exagerated. For example, OpenRC very easily handles systemd's tmpfiles.d, which are very well documented: http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/tmpfiles.d.html
    This has allowed many simplifications on ebuilds and init scripts.

    https://github.com/desrt/systemd-shim does the same with other (documented) systemd APIs.

  8. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    8
    Mircea Popescu 
    Friday, 21 November 2014

    Yeah, we'll see if the rape victims actually want to commit resources to not being raped anymore. Also a do-ocracy.

    Such logic, well done.

  9. Funny how it's either a cult or a "do-ocracy" depending on which side one sits on.

  10. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    10
    Mircea Popescu 
    Friday, 21 November 2014

    In any event this "we'll see" aproach completely misses the boat. What else will we see, how css 17.0 is a thing, how web 2.0 matters, how what exactly ? Half the Internet is still transitional 1.0, no further than yesterday we ran into a heartbleeding would-be C&C center, what is there to see ?

    You can see anything you want to see. In most cases, you do.

  11. The one 'we'll see' that seems rather likely is - a logical conclusion of the schism, where Linux as a going concern dies of cancer, and folks who actually want something recognizable as a genuine Linux box (vs. an ad-hoc reimplementation of Ms-Winblows) will be strapping on their parachutes, of whatever kind and quality are available.

    The Linux kernel will become, to them, merely an encyclopaedia from which to silently crib device driver specs. Hell, the only reason why I ever used any variant of Linux at all was hardware support.

  12. What do you propose, exactly? Developers should follow what some vocal users say, despite them having no clue on what they are talking about*? In other words, slavery?

    * If you say systemd = windows or = monolithic, you didn't even take the time to look at what it is.

  13. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    13
    Mircea Popescu 
    Saturday, 22 November 2014

    @Stanislav Datskovskiy Seems kinda a future-in-the-past, this. I don't seem to recall using Debian anything past Sarge, unless you count Ubuntu as Debian, therewhich 10.04 makes a decent entry level system for noobs. Ulterior versions are, of course, worse than nothing.

    @pankkake So stated the question is useless. What I propose is sticking to the original ideas that made linux worth using, and that made unix worth using enough so that when the previous generation of tards fucked it up (back then it was "patents" idiocy) it was worth reimplementing as linux. If what those are needs any expounding in this venue, the student in question is not ready yet to make anything at all. This last point is too easily glossed over, by imbecile adolescents in their fear of "slavery". It is an important point. Not anybody, anytime, anywhere is intellectually apt and mentally ready to write code. If this is what you fear under the name of "slavery", then let me tell you that no manumission can ever free you from this particular slavery.

  14. Getting a straight answer is such a pain.

    So what ideas made "linux" and "unix" "worth using", and why is systemd changing that? Will I get a straight answer or yet another deflection?

    I'm not sure where you are going here. I have no doubt systemd detractors have little abilities, which is why I said "resources". They could fund development if it was so important. My prediction was that it won't happen.

  15. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    15
    Mircea Popescu 
    Saturday, 22 November 2014

    You're not going to get a "straight answer", principally because your definition of "straight answer" is "an answer which neatly fits my precoinceived ideas - which aren't even randomly preconceived for that matter, but instead so constructed as to reach particular mistaken conclusions I happen to feel comfortable with". Feel free to complain that the world doesn't readily satisfy your expectations on this score.

    I'm not going to go into a silly comparison of namedropping. For one thing, there is no such thing as "systemd detractors". There's a very precious few kids pushing a particular agenda on one hand, and the whole rest of the world on the other hand. This comparison is by definition and will perpetually stay unequal. And no, Poettering won't matter in a few years, after this debacle settles into the dust of public forgetfulness any more than he matters today, a few years after his avahi debacle settled into the dust of public forgetfulness.

    Anf fuck you with your "funding development" bullshit. Yes, I get it, the USG is printing money like there's no tomorrow, and its agents masquerading as "contractors" like to pretend like the pointless crud they try to pave the world with is "backed by money". It's not. It's backed by empty promises. systemd development is not funded in any sense. Most importantly, it's not intellectually funded.

  16. Meanwhile http://www.edwardgoldsmith.org >> "connection reset by peer". RIP.

  1. [...] SystemD wrecking artist Lennart Poettering has proposed a substantial reworking of the way Linux handles users which would break many of the ways Linux is actually used under the pretext that the changes would make him feel more comfortable leaving his laptop in a suspended power state (archived). [...]

Add your cents! »
    If this is your first comment, it will wait to be approved. This usually takes a few hours. Subsequent comments are not delayed.