It was maybe meant as an insult, but it kinda made me proud to be a Slacker! Lol

Sometimes I'm running Slack because it's easy, other times I think I'm running it because I support Pat's one finger salute! :(

I agree it was probably meant as an insult, but it also, unintentionally, exposes a deeper truth that many Slackers have come to realize, often expressed something like "You either get it or you don't."

Puttering clearly doesn't.

Apart from the pros and cons of day-to-day use of systemd instead of init, will this not have major implications for anyone who upgrades Slackware as opposed to doing a clean install when a new version is released?

When Arch can handle a switch to systemd I doubt that it should be a problem for Slackware, especially when you keep in mind that it is advised to read the release notes and the hints and changes document. I think most Arch users don't do something like that.

But I think we can only see how mach impact a switch would have when and if a switch occurs.

Freedom or power?
 

I will be bluntly and a bit philosopher too. I wish people here
don't take some level of abstraction like "off topic" but like a
search of the real causes of the issue.

Let's analyze our weak points.

Personally I disagree with Stallman in he mistakes cause for
effect. Monopolies are not evil but are a bad symptom and yes,
they are mainly the result of consumerism. "You can", "Just do
it", don't think, buy and drop, buy and drop. Final users (the
"masses", that all nouveau Che Guevara out there pretend to
defend), are the real dictator.

But, at the same time if you take a look to history, you know
that the (voluntary?) lack of conciousness of people is an
unbeatable enemy. Including those behind monopolies, they think
that they really take "advantage" with their mafia practices
(like closing the code).

The gentleman's solution in this case is "don't buy it". Around
1996 I reach to the sad conclusion that I was not able to buy
sport shoes not made in China. So the alternative to "don't buy
it" was to be barefoot. Do you like Google "modern" and
"innovated" today interface? Eat it!

So, taking in care you are in front an unbeatable enemy, what to
do? I force myself (hardly) to think that Stallman took the
pragmatic way: demagogy. He did the dirty job, he became a
politic and crucified himself to save all of us :-). We are not
reinventing the wheel, it's just one wheel, an giant wheel, and
we are in one of its infinite axis and perhaps condemned to see
the circus going on. This wheel is not moved by the wish of
freedom; it is moved by envy.

This is not a today problem, and the image of the wheel could at
least give you some hope "We were able to slip away in the past
we will be able in the future" you may think. But today we
assist to the problem's "metastasis". Too much people in the
world, the unbeatable enemy grows out of control (like the 1985
Brazil film's giant samurai). The today "more is better" culture
should stop now. Obviously this will not happen thus tomorrow
you will not "can". You will have neither GPS nor milk.

Please, before calling me pessimist (or "defeatist", like
Stallman did) take in care that posting this could be considered
a pure optimistic act.

As a side note to this thread I hope Slackware switches to the new(not really new they have been around for a few years now) Free/Net BSD rc.conf init scripts. So much cleaner than what we have now, and much more saner than systemD.

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=rc&sektion=8

Or, maybe if it's not broke, don't fix it.

I got excited when Patrick said maybe a Linux kernel + FreeBSD userland.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ml#post4726292

The sad thing is that such a change would only shift the problems slightly. If a developer decides to make systemd a hard dependency for his software he is basically locking out any BSD, including a BSD userland on a Linux kernel.

Still got excited though. I'm also following the Arch Linux BSD thread.
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=142679

I'm sure the Slackware team will make the right decision if they have to make a choice.

Some people already use pkgsrc on Slackware
http://code.google.com/p/pkgsrc-on-slack/

There's even a distro. http://voltalinux.sicurezzarete.com/

Others use Crux ports on Slackware, which is Linux but cool nonetheless.
http://code.google.com/p/crux4slack/

The decisions of the Slackware team with regard to systemd will be highly influenced by the shared opinion as voiced in my signature.

Eric

That works too. lol

Can anybody ask Miquel van Smoorenburg if he would still maintain init if all Linux distros minus Slackware moved to Systemd?

I don't think Miquel has had much to do with sysvinit maintenance for quite some time. In any case, the init daemon hardly requires any maintenance. Until the recent version bump, it hadn't been changed in 6 years, and for 5 before that. It was upgraded for this release solely because it would have been necessary to make some changes to get it compiling again, and Debian had already done them. Not that x86 or x86_64 needed to recompile it, but ARM did, and ARMedSlack didn't want to move to a different version than x86/x86_64 used.

Maintaining sysvinit would be less effort than dealing with systemd related problems by many, many orders of magnitude.

I thought you were supposed to fix it until it breaks ;)