Monday, July 18, 2011

Sarcasm - Lennart Poettering

I could not stop laughing after looking at things that happened after Lennart Poettering's interview on LinuxFr.com. Just reading the article would give anyone a clear idea that this is the start of another flamewar. Just forget about the software, and focus on the sarcasm and the joke in the scenario I describe below, you will be able to see and enjoy what I enjoyed.

Slashdot had published the above article with the following title "Lennart Poettering: BSD Isn't Relevant Anymore". It had 415 comments the last time I checked. Out of the comments I read on the thread, the following two really are punching, whether they stand correct or not.

I don't take anything from this guy seriously after dealing with Pulse Audio on a few systems. The shit never improved and only added a layer of incompatibility to systems that ran just fine using ALSA by itself.
The below comes the reply:
He has a tendency to develop things halfway, without taking any input from any users, and then everyone using Fedora has to end up using it even if it's complete shit. If you criticize him, he's got some staunch defenders that will call you out on it, mostly the people who have only ever used Linux on a laptop... that really does seem to be the only thing he cares about.
PulseAudio - a useless NIH layer. ALSA was just fine. He lists a bunch of other problems with Linux audio, but everyone was just using ALSA directly, nobody was using his straw men really (Jack? OSS? Really?) This is the first thing I remove on my Linux boxes.
I predict systemd will be his next "hit". He named the control command "systemctl" even though every Linux has a "sysctl" command already... one of the most easily avoidable CLI namespace problems I have ever seen in over 20 years of UNIX and 18 years of Linux administration. I think systemd is because he really really wants to make Linux into MacOS X. If you want MacOS X, then great, it's a fine desktop OS, have at it.... but Linux is still mostly used on servers, and there is nothing wrong with that at all. Anyway, systemd just throws out everything that was good about init and even upstart, and starts over, and he is busy adding the features of cron and inetd to it for some reason. Because saving some tiny amount of space in the process table is somehow useful.
I just wish there was some review of features that make it into Fedora, etc, to see if they're really worth it.

After looking at some of the comments, I did a google search and came across a link, clicked on it, and the first line is by Lennart Poettering. It was just a single line by him. It reads "Slashdot is useless".

This leads me to wonder which is the guy creates more; software or flameware?

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