Debian systemd maintainer Luca Boccassi has recently pushed through and dismissed several problematic and undesired breakages as "niche cases" in a way I personally find antithetical to what I expect from Debian.
I hope they have a change of mind in their approach.
Yes, the guy is legendary in terms of maximum arrogance. He did impressive work early on designing a complex system, but gets defensive when that overengineered moloch runs into real-world problems. Systemd has accumulated lots of small hacks to make it more versatile, let's hope a better solution will be available one day.
Apparently yes, since the parent to your comment has been flagged.
Personally I find an interesting observation, and microsoft contributing to linux in any way should be met with skepticism based on the entire last 30 years.
People are so quick to wipe away any wrongdoing from Microsoft as soon as they get thrown a bone, there's some interesting psychology here.
I would say no because microsoft seems to have a magical ability to over-complicate systems, UIs, etc. Not to mention the fact that they were out to crush Linux not so many years ago (through proxies even!). Trusting them to make good, unix-like choices seems ill-informed.
It's complicated. Microsoft devotes resources to it and they can afford to do so but they only have that luxury from being a massive user trampling megacorp.
If we could trust them to be devoting resources to it without any risk of abusing their access and power in the future, that would be sort of okay, but we can't.
Like, should Lockheed intentionally hire North Korean programmers at cheap rates because North Korea can afford to devote resources to helping Lockheed? The issue here is not primarily that North Korea is a massive citizen-trampling megastate. It's that Lockheed's interests are misaligned with North Korea's.
The goals of Debian is based on those who contribute to it. If Microsoft contributes, then it cannot be misaligned. That's what it means to be open. You may not like how that affects Debian, but to deny Microsoft the ability to participate would be equivalent to no longer being truly open.
Also individuals tend to prioritize work that benefits employer interest but that doesn't mean they can do things arbitrarily. It just shifts energy and focus towards certain areas. It's not a problem unless the company employs a large fraction of Debian maintainers which Microsoft doesn't.
No, Debian has a mission of its own, and has always excluded candidates for Developership if they are opposed to Debian's mission. It has never been open in the way you are imagining.
I think employing the project lead of systemd gives Microsoft a kind of influence that employing the packager of libjpeg-turbo wouldn't. Lennart is notorious for doing things arbitrarily, and what we are discussing here is that the Debian package maintainer for systemd is also doing things arbitrarily, and is also employed by Microsoft.
how does that work when Microsoft also makes a competing operating system?
If we think about it in logical terms, they could sabotage Debian by having “interests” that are suboptimal for their core demographic.
this is a similar to how euro-skeptics are the people who make the very unpopular laws inside the European Union, leading to all the negative press about the European Union. But they have to be listened to as they are democratically elected and it is a democracy.
I don't know of anyone that's been doing this for a while that hasn't been touched by systemd stupidity in some way. I still loathe the default behavior around the stub-resolver with unqualified names that "just worked" before Lennart decided he knew best.
I've been a Linux sysadmin professionally for 10 years now. I have never had problems with systemd, nor do I consider it to be stupid. Obviously you don't have to like it, but I think you're painting with too broad of a brush.
Doesn’t that mean you started being a sysadmin after systemd was widely adopted? Most people who dislike it probably actively worked with Linux prior to systemd.
Depends on what you mean by this in "been doing this"?
While work now mandates "If you want to use Linux, it has to be Ubuntu" (and I complied). On personal front - about a decade ago I've moved from "vanilla" Gentoo to Calculate Linux - which was and still is 100% Gentoo.
These days difference is even smaller, but already 10+ years ago Calculate had sane profiles as well as all software packages as pre compiled binaries matching those profiles.
And although systemd is one of configurable USE keywords on Calculate/Gentoo - it's still not the default.
So there probably are some folks that haven't been touched by systemd at all... For now.
To be fair, he does know how globbing works: ".*" should include "." and ".." under normal globbing rules. The 'rm' command (presumably) has a special case in it to avoid traversing those in recursive mode because doing so would be a footgun.
There is Devuan, if you want to Debian but without systemd. I suspect though that "natively" non-systemd distros will be more consistent, personally I've found happiness with Guix.
I hope they have a change of mind in their approach.