Wookey <woo...@wookware.org> writes: > I've changed all of those bits on my cars at some point, and the fact > that it was relatively simple to do was, and is, a good thing. I've > never owned a car with a warranty, and as they only come with one for > the first few years, they are not that relevant to the majority of > vehicle ownership.
> Hacking is good. Replaceable parts with vaguely standard, or at least > discoverable, interfaces is also good. This is just as true in cars as > it is in computers. PLease don't try to tell us that hackability and > fixability is bad. I agree wholeheartedly with Wookey on this. If systemd were actually some sort of closed black box, I would not want to run it on my systems. The car analogy is not really that good period, but to go out on a limb and try to strain it into a vaguely more accurate shape, I think one of the things that people are concerned about is that sysvinit plus surrounding infrastructure is an "assemble your own car" kit. We have a distribution full of auto mechanics, and we're actually really good at assembling cars, so there's a lot of appeal in that. But some parts of the kit are pretty questionable, and while a lot of people like stick shifts, the fact that the kit doesn't even allow for the possibility of an automatic transmission, let alone any of this new-fangled hybrid stuff, is getting kind of annoying. systemd is an unpainted but mostly functional car body and engine that you can disassemble and reassemble. You can very easily remove the engine, take apart the drive train, rewire the carborator, and so forth. And it has support for hybrid power trains (and an automatic transmission). And all the parts are standardized and work together... *internally*. But it comes with a few pieces that we previously were providing ourselves when we built our own car, and it's dubious whether those are really better. And each time someone points out something that the car is missing, the systemd folks prefer to add that piece to all future cars in a way that works according to their vision of the car, as opposed to pointing people at five or six suppliers who can produce compatible parts. This analogy still has a ton of problems, but I think it captures a bit more of the nuance of the situation. When you start from systemd, you are moving away from the community of practice that had been built up around the old assemble-your-own-car kit. And some of the parts don't work quite right, and sometimes one has to go at systemd with a grinder and a saw to get them to fit back together. But the systemd kit has some Really Neat Parts, and it was rather inobvious how we were going to fit those into the world of the old car kit. Also, it's kind of nice to start from a bunch of parts that all use the same size screwdriver and wrench, have standard fittings, and don't require a bunch of home-made tools to assemble properly. (Even if we have some fond memories and a lot of respect for our wrenchamdriver.) I won't even attempt to explain upstart in this analogy... I'll leave that for someone else. :) -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87eh3915yp....@windlord.stanford.edu