Systemd and ConsoleKit

Posted May 5, 2011 14:42 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
In reply to: Systemd and ConsoleKit by anselm
Parent article: Systemd and ConsoleKit

Yeah, just as free as his free offer to "... maintain CK and all the other stuff if you want".

You could argue with users heavily depending on CK (or ALSA hacks, or System V, or else) that they should not put themselves in such a position. If their software had been better designed they would not have been so dependent in the first place, they did the wrong thing, etc., etc.

You will probably be right. So much right that they will just switch back to an operating system that actually cares about support and backward compatibility. Even for "bad" users.

I do not blame Lennart for the great software he writes for free. I do not even blame him for how fast and how much software he buries. I was only blaming him for his extremely naive "just a free offer" above. No drug dealer is that naive.

to post comments

Systemd and ConsoleKit

Posted May 5, 2011 15:10 UTC (Thu) by spaetz (guest, #32870) [Link]

@LWN, can I get an option to filter some articles' comments rather than individuals? Some articles seem to make madmen out of usually sane people, and they seem to cause logorhea too.

Ps. Sorry nothing personal against my pre-poster, it's just that I have enough of the repetitive arguments going on in these articles They will convince no one who is already 120% sure of their position. Could you please start shouting your arguments in some lone forest rather than on LWN?

Systemd and ConsoleKit

Posted May 5, 2011 16:56 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (1 responses)

I do not blame Lennart for the great software he writes for free. I do not even blame him for how fast and how much software he buries. I was only blaming him for his extremely naive "just a free offer" above. No drug dealer is that naive.

Since when has having started a piece of free software implied that you must maintain it forever? If Lennart finds a more convenient (to him) way of doing what ConsoleKit is doing then he should be free to do what he thinks makes sense.

No one complained when Linus Torvalds decided he would much rather continue hacking on the Linux kernel than work on Git; instead, other people stepped up to take over. Similarly, if someone else wants to hang on to the original ConsoleKit they can go on using and developing that for as long as they wish. Last I checked it was under the GPL, so they don't even need Lennart's actual consent.

Finally, as has been mentioned many times before, systemd can work with unchanged old-style init scripts. It is reasonable to assume that there will also be a migration path from ConsoleKit to a version of systemd that contains the equivalent functionality (however it will be implemented). Hence chances are that most current ConsoleKit users will be unlikely to even notice the difference.

Systemd and ConsoleKit

Posted May 5, 2011 20:54 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> > I do not blame Lennart for the great software he writes for free. I do not even blame him for how fast and how much software he buries.

> Since when has having started a piece of free software implied that you must maintain it forever?

Read what is quoted above more slowly and realize we agree. My point was in the next sentence (not quoted).

Systemd and ConsoleKit

Posted May 6, 2011 4:09 UTC (Fri) by Kamilion (subscriber, #42576) [Link]

import humor;
import sarcasm;

Honestly? I'm sick of backwards compatibility. It only works so well. There's a limit.

Especially in this day and age of virtualization.

If I want to run DOS software, I open up dosbox. Even on windows.
Why? Well, NT's VDM emulates a soundblaster really poorly. It handles resolution switches like a two legged dog.

If I want to run Win95 software that didn't have proper NT compatibilty; I launch Virtualbox or VMware with win98se.

If it doesn't work in wine, VB or VMWare to the rescue.

"Backwards Compatibility" as a meme is dead, or at least enough of a fib these days to where even game consoles cannot get it right. (PS3 drops PSX and PS2 support, 360 can only play ~150 XBox titles)

Why should you expect a PC to get it right?

Well, more to the point, why should you expect a PC to get it right when you mix several *generations* of software on the same GUI desktop?

Okay, sure, your processor can always drop back to 32bit protected mode and run freedos on bare metal, or you can still install Windows 98 (if you can find hardware drivers) or a laundry list of everything else; but it's a horrible bitch to get all of those apps open, in a window, on the same desktop.

I've tried to do this on my windows 7 professional box (gotta run visual studio 2010 for work somewhere... Even when we use QT. *sigh*)

My ubuntu box? Hey, no problem. I can goof off playing System Shock for DOS in a window while an old VB app does OLE against excel 95 in wine, with Eclipse and Chromium 12 sitting behind them, I don't have to worry about drivers (except this damned eGalax touchscreen!), and I have not *HAD* to open a terminal window in a very very long while.

Thanks to lennart, I can also plug my USB headphones in when my boss runs his mouth and poof, silence in the office.

Also, if I'm not mistaken, wasn't ConsoleKit pretty much built to bring multiuser switching to Fedora 7? I remember everyone kvetching about having to support it when it was introduced; and somehow in those years in between, it's become incumbent to the point where people are moaning about it's loss. What's next, people complaining that PulseAudio works too well?

Systemd and ConsoleKit

Posted May 6, 2011 12:38 UTC (Fri) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link] (3 responses)

> I do not blame Lennart for the great software he writes for free. I do not even blame him for how fast and how much software he buries. I was only blaming him for his extremely naive "just a free offer" above. No drug dealer is that naive.

Replying to you and quoting that last sentence. I really can't agree with your way of putting that. If you can mentally radically reformulate it though, I would say that this is one of the reasons that free (as in free beer, but possibly by extension as in free speech) software will have a hard time reaching a high number of private desktops. Many people can't afford to depend on software for which the maintainers don't have some sort of obligation to them (even just the sort "I won't buy it unless it this and that"). Lennart's obligation is to RedHat (and even then systemd started as, and possibly still is, a private initiative) and to no one else unless RedHat says so - offering systemd for free does not obligate him to anyone, a rather different situation to your drug dealer.

I suspect that this situation will persist at least until "free beer" and "free speech" can be properly separated (programmers, think orthogonality!).

Systemd and ConsoleKit

Posted May 6, 2011 12:57 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (2 responses)

I would say that this is one of the reasons that free (as in free beer, but possibly by extension as in free speech) software will have a hard time reaching a high number of private desktops. Many people can't afford to depend on software for which the maintainers don't have some sort of obligation to them

When people decide to run Linux on their private desktop, they won't usually make that contingent on the fact that their Linux distributions run specific technology such as System V init and ConsoleKit. They're in it for the complete picture. When they install a distribution such as Debian or Fedora, they put their trust in the maintainers of that distribution to keep their systems running, not to maintain whatever selection of software packages they had originally installed, for eternity.

I don't think anyone who has made the move to Linux will consider going back to whatever they ran before simply because their Linux distribution is moving to a different type of user session switcher. If OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice were suddenly to disappear from view, that might be a problem for many users but for most of the basic infrastructure this is simply not the case because people don't tend to notice the individual software packages involved.

It is safe to say that most people will not care in the least whether their systems run System V init/ConsoleKit or systemd, as long as their systems run reliably and as long as, if they have started out with a setup based on System V init/ConsoleKit, the eventual transition to systemd happens in a way that does not lead to regressions or other noticeable problems.

Systemd and ConsoleKit

Posted May 6, 2011 13:10 UTC (Fri) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link] (1 responses)

>> I would say that this is one of the reasons that free (as in free beer, but possibly by extension as in free speech) software will have a hard time reaching a high number of private desktops. Many people can't afford to depend on software for which the maintainers don't have some sort of obligation to them

> When people decide to run Linux on their private desktop, they won't usually make that contingent on the fact that their Linux distributions run specific technology such as System V init and ConsoleKit. They're in it for the complete picture. When they install a distribution such as Debian or Fedora, they put their trust in the maintainers of that distribution to keep their systems running, not to maintain whatever selection of software packages they had originally installed, for eternity.

I will rephrase my point in this context then. They are trusting the distribution maintainers do act in their interests, but once again those maintainers have no sort of obligation to do so (yes, there is a reputation thing, but that is a very limited sort of obligation). So the maintainers will act as they see fit. For RedHat and friends, this means being answerable to enterprise customers, who have different needs to private desktop ones. In Debian there is, to my knowledge, a high overlap between maintainers and users (or at least the sort of person who uses Debian), but again, if you have different needs it may not be the right thing for you. Ubuntu looks to fulfil the needs of desktop users, sometimes in a slightly "we know what you need" sort of way, but still very well given their budget constraints. Unfortunately (I think) those constraints are too tight to make a sufficient impact in the direction of providing something really suitable to a majority of desktop users. I know there are other reasons, but I think this is still a major one.

Systemd and ConsoleKit

Posted May 6, 2011 13:45 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

They are trusting the distribution maintainers do act in their interests, but once again those maintainers have no sort of obligation to do so (yes, there is a reputation thing, but that is a very limited sort of obligation). So the maintainers will act as they see fit.

But the same applies to any operating system. For example, Microsoft's sole obligation is to keep the company profitable on behalf of its shareholders, which probably includes putting out versions of Windows etc. that are not so atrociously horrid that nobody will buy them (again, a »reputation thing«), but which most certainly does not include an obligation to keep every existing Windows machine in the world running forever. Within these constraints, Microsoft will act as they see fit.

People don't reasonably expect to buy a computer and then hang on to it for the rest of their own lives. So they only need to trust their vendors to keep the computer going during its useful life, which for most people these days is probably three to five years. In fact, many if not most people will not install a new major release of their machine's operating system vendors tend to find it difficult enough to make people install important security updates.

There are certainly Linux distributions around that will last for three to five years (on the same machine), and if »maintainer distrust« is indeed a major factor that keeps people from running Linux desktops, then we have a PR problem, not a technical or developer-social problem. After all, the nice thing about free software is that important stuff tends to stay around basically forever, and that one does not need to depend on a single vendor, whereas, in the world of proprietary software, if your vendor calls curtains on something you use that's it then.