[arch-general] SystemD poll

[Felipe Contreras]

On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 11:02 PM, Andrew Hills <hills.as at gmail.com> wrote:
> Felipe--if I may address you by your first name--in case you're
> confused about why no one will listen to your arguments, let me
> try to explain; it may reduce your frustration. You made the
> following two statements without any evidence or even any
> suggestion that you care about evidence:

But here's the thing: I am not the one that needs to make a claim;
it's other people that make the claim that systemd is ready to be the
default for Arch Linux. Where is the evidence? There is no evidence...
All the evidence provided so far is derived from personal experience,
mostly in the form of "It works for me", or "A lot of users have
already switched without problems" (for which there is no direct
evidence either, only personal experience).

So you see, I don't need to prove anything, I simply need to point out
the fact that there's no evidence for the aforementioned claim. Of
course, I could try to provide evidence to further advance my
argument, and provided a few data-points, but I don't *need* to. This
is the basic of rationality; the one that makes the claim has the
burden of proof.

Is systemd ready? Where is the evidence?

>> But supposing there was something before, I'm
>> sure the people that made the transition did it in a responsible
>> manner trying hard not to break anything.
> ...
>> I can probably point to dozens of
>> problems that systemd has that initscripts doesn't (today). That's
>> enough reason to hold on the move.

Notice that I said "probably". Again, I don't *need* to provide any
evidence because I'm not making the claim that systemd has problems,
or that it's not ready, I am simply asking for evidence that it is.

That being said, I already tried to provide many examples of these
issues, I would gladly summarize them for you if that would somehow
advance my argument, but given the fact you seem to think that I
*need* to provide this evidence makes me think that you are not
familiarized with rational discussions, and that even if I do provide
this evidence in a short and sweet form, it won't do anything, as you
will come up with cheap rationalizations as to why that is irrelevant.
Also, you only need to take a look at arch-general lately to see
problems with systemd everywhere. So it would probably be a waste of
my time to copy-paste these and other problems here.

> Additionally, your tendency to overgeneralize leads to such FUD as:
>
>> What's the purpose of a distro that doesn't even work?
>
> Your only rational arguments have been nitpicks such as your
> recent response to Sven-Hendrik Haase, which I will not quote here.
> So, you are aggravating those who will bother to respond to you, but
> not really providing compelling arguments for those who are looking
> for a helpful discussion. I stayed out of this thread until I just couldn't
> take any more of your nonsense.

This is what I was answering to:

> "Bleeding edge"
> Look it up.
> Your assumption that the primary purpose of Arch is to be a long-term stable distro is misguided.

Apparently people don't understand what I am saying, so I will assume
you are not either, so let me explain what I meant with "What's the
purpose of a distro that doesn't even work?". This is obviously a
rhetorical question, as the obvious answer is that such a distribution
has no purpose. Each and every distribution attempts to be usable at
least to some level. No distribution would aim to be unbootable. That
is *OBVIOUS*.

So what was my intention with this rhetorical device? Simply to show
that even "bleeding edge" distributions should still be careful about
not being unusable, and I even went further describing exactly that:
you can be on the bleeding edge and still *try* to not break things.
Since you deliberately didn't quote the rest of the paragraph, the
original meaning might not be clear, but obviously it's not within the
context.

The point was that all distributions should aim to at least be
bootable and should be careful with things that might break the boot.
What's wrong with this point? What's FUD about it?

You should focus on my arguments, not on my rhetoric.

Cheers.

-- 
Felipe Contreras