[ale] Are the kernel developers a-holes? (was: Debian fork thoughts?)

[Solomon Peachy]

On Wed, Dec 03, 2014 at 01:07:38PM -0500, James Sumners wrote:
> > > But they don't do most of that before they've already managed to get
> > > the project to be a major dependency of other projects.
> >
> >
> Uh, hello, systemd and pulseaudio? GNOME? Do these ring a bell?

systemd and pulseaudio are both actively developed and maintained, far 
from abandoned or unsupported.

Meanwhile, GNOME is developed by independent third parties, and their 
design choices and the dependencies they choose to require are entirely 
their responsibility.  

> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/ -- Creator doesn't seem
> to have committed in at least 5 years on this thing no one wanted.

Pulseaudio is actively developed, with major releases roughly every 6-9 
months.  So what if Pottering hasn't committed anything in five years?  
Is he (or anyone else, for that matter) somehow obligated to perpetually 
contribute?

...As for "no one wanted" -- Again, [citation needed]. 

As a counter point, here's something from six years or so ago:

  http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/jeffrey-stedfast.html

Speaking for myself, I was quite happy when Fedora integrated 
PulseAudio.  I finally had application-transparent, 
multi-stream/multi-output desktop audio comparable to what was shipped 
as a core component of Windows Vista.  Most of the pusleaudio teeth 
gnashing was due to Ubuntu 8.04 (and several subsequent releases) 
shipping badly misconfigured and poorly-tested configurations and then 
refusing to fix things properly. In comparison, Fedora's Pulseaudio 
support of the same era was stable and worked, aside from bugs in stuff 
like the perpetual train wreck that is the proprietary Flash plugin.
 
> https://plus.google.com/+TheodoreTso/posts/4W6rrMMvhWU

Given that Tso's gripes were about NetworkManager, polkit, and GNOME's 
failings, has mostly good things to say about systemd, and the bugs he 
found are a combination of the the fact he's using debian-testing and 
mangling configurations that he admits he didn't actually understand 
(nor did he want to take the time to understand) ...this doesn't 
actually support your assertion.

> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=76935 ->

A genuine bug that has been fixed even before it had been reported, but 
the problem that erupted the bug report stemmed from differning 
interpretations of the kernel->userspace API.  The end-result is that 
*both* the kernel and systemd made changes, and life went on.

See comment 22 for a good summary:
  https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=76935#c22

(Incidentally, Phoronix is sort of like the New York Post or Daily Mail 
 of Linux; While Larabel does a lot of good work with his PTS efforts,  
 it seems like he kinda misses the point with his editorializing, 
 protraying normal, day-to-day events as having far more 
 significance than they deserve.  And the forums are barely better than 
 reddit or 4chan.. )

Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for you to support your assertions that the 
systemd developers "have a history of dumping projects no one asked for 
on the community and then not supporting them [...] or plain abandoning 
them [...] before they've already managed to get the project to be a 
major dependency of other projects."

Or are you still asserting that folks are obliged to perpetually 
develop, support, or otherwise contribute to any software they've ever 
been involved with?

 - Solomon
-- 
Solomon Peachy        		       pizza at shaftnet dot org
Delray Beach, FL                          ^^ (email/xmpp) ^^
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
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