Downvoting this post is unwarranted. Everything that Lennart Poettering has ever done was an unreliable clusterfuck[1] astray from the Unix philosphy. There's nothing that he has ever done that is considered "good" by a majority of Unix-derivative users.
I remember watching this video and Poettering's argument were very sound and he has managed to repel most (if not all) Draxinger's points.
The problem with "it's not the UNIX way" argument is that a lot of people don't care about UNIX that much, they just want a good system. Poettering mentions in that video that all his, and his colleagues' work (pulseaudio, consolekit, udev into udisks/upower) has been done because there was an actual demand for those features. There is a reason why most distributions use their work even as people complain about them.
I'm not going to watch this cringeworthy thing again, but i can remember than he insisted that dbus was useful and that we need a gnome session in our login manager. That would be enough to proof the point.
And the point is that the arguments he made about why dbus is useful (a lightweight IPC mechanism with use cases not covered by UNIX sockets or TCP sockets, doing much more) and why do we need a gnome session on the gdm (to get i18n, network and accessibility features you need most if not all of the session) are well reasoned and make sense to us out of the loop.
Yes. dbus effectively breaks network transparency of x11 apps and turns Linux into a Desktop-Single-User OS. While I'm not regually writing desktop applications i have never ever missed dbus. And ipc mechanisms have a tendency to become unpleasant (Corba, SOAP).
I don't have a gnome session in my login manager because I don't need i18n for the words "login" and "password". (although that would be totally possible without a whole gnome session). I don't have a braille line so i can't say anything about accessibility, but that should be (in a ideal unix world) a single printf to /dev/braille. Also the feedback is audible and visual, this seems to be no issue to me.
Accessibility is actually a requirement in many countries (per law). Obviously not everyone needs it, but just that you do not need it doesn't negate that others do.
Edit: Plus saying X breaks Y so X is not needed is not a good argument. Because you have not addressed if X is needed or not, only said that Y breaks.
I have no idear how "accessibility" is defined. I'd say getty is quite accessible, but well, I don't know, I never relied on it. But yet, that is no excuse to start a hole desktop. Just like a program can use gtk (theoretically) without a gnome desktop it should be able to do the same with for a braille display.
I think I can safely say that if X breaks Y, and I need Y than X sucks. Especially if it worked before X came. X made things worse.
/edit:
I think that's why Poettering is hated so much. There was community on the Nixes, with their own ecosystem and their own way to do stuff. It's wasn't always beautiful or nice, but their had their way to solve stuff so it would a kind of blend in with the rest. And then Poettering wants to turn it into MacOS X or Windows and adds stuff new users probably appreciate, but the old users never misses. There is a cultural shock. And then it breaks backwards compatibility. It shouldn't suprise anybody that this product should rather be superb and not just medicore to accepted.
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Downvoting this post is unwarranted. Everything that Lennart Poettering has ever done was an unreliable clusterfuck[1] astray from the Unix philosphy. There's nothing that he has ever done that is considered "good" by a majority of Unix-derivative users.
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTdUmlGxVo0
I remember watching this video and Poettering's argument were very sound and he has managed to repel most (if not all) Draxinger's points.
The problem with "it's not the UNIX way" argument is that a lot of people don't care about UNIX that much, they just want a good system. Poettering mentions in that video that all his, and his colleagues' work (pulseaudio, consolekit, udev into udisks/upower) has been done because there was an actual demand for those features. There is a reason why most distributions use their work even as people complain about them.
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTdUmlGxVo0
Poettering has clearly the better arguments than this reactionary Draxinger die-hard.
Poettering gets things wrong more than once, and Draxinger could have stomped him, if he were a little bit more informed on the details.
Can you chime in and inform us where is Lennart wrong and how? I (and probably many others) would LOVE that.
I'm not going to watch this cringeworthy thing again, but i can remember than he insisted that dbus was useful and that we need a gnome session in our login manager. That would be enough to proof the point.
And the point is that the arguments he made about why dbus is useful (a lightweight IPC mechanism with use cases not covered by UNIX sockets or TCP sockets, doing much more) and why do we need a gnome session on the gdm (to get i18n, network and accessibility features you need most if not all of the session) are well reasoned and make sense to us out of the loop.
Could you provide the counterarguments?
Yes. dbus effectively breaks network transparency of x11 apps and turns Linux into a Desktop-Single-User OS. While I'm not regually writing desktop applications i have never ever missed dbus. And ipc mechanisms have a tendency to become unpleasant (Corba, SOAP).
I don't have a gnome session in my login manager because I don't need i18n for the words "login" and "password". (although that would be totally possible without a whole gnome session). I don't have a braille line so i can't say anything about accessibility, but that should be (in a ideal unix world) a single printf to /dev/braille. Also the feedback is audible and visual, this seems to be no issue to me.
Accessibility is actually a requirement in many countries (per law). Obviously not everyone needs it, but just that you do not need it doesn't negate that others do.
Edit: Plus saying X breaks Y so X is not needed is not a good argument. Because you have not addressed if X is needed or not, only said that Y breaks.
I have no idear how "accessibility" is defined. I'd say getty is quite accessible, but well, I don't know, I never relied on it. But yet, that is no excuse to start a hole desktop. Just like a program can use gtk (theoretically) without a gnome desktop it should be able to do the same with for a braille display.
I think I can safely say that if X breaks Y, and I need Y than X sucks. Especially if it worked before X came. X made things worse.
/edit: I think that's why Poettering is hated so much. There was community on the Nixes, with their own ecosystem and their own way to do stuff. It's wasn't always beautiful or nice, but their had their way to solve stuff so it would a kind of blend in with the rest. And then Poettering wants to turn it into MacOS X or Windows and adds stuff new users probably appreciate, but the old users never misses. There is a cultural shock. And then it breaks backwards compatibility. It shouldn't suprise anybody that this product should rather be superb and not just medicore to accepted.
> There's nothing that he has ever done that is considered "good" by a majority of Unix-derivative users.
Is there really anything at all that a majority of Unix-derivative users can agree on?