I am surprised over all the effort given to the systemd-api. Are any of you guys actually _using_ the api? Does it matter if the library functions are public or non-public?
Personally, it scares the sh?t out of me that it (ie systemd) presents a single attack-vector - and so should you all. Next in line - binary (and broken when things break/go awry) journals.
And no - I have not scrutinized the code (and yes, I _am_ a c-programmer first and foremost, script-kiddie next and sysadm for more years than I care to remember) - what concerns me more than code quality is the haughtiness of the devs and their attitude to problems/bugs - and then they want to take over the world.

I know none of you will ever ask _my_ opinion on it - so I'll give it to you for free. I wouldn't touch systemd with even a red hot poker.

I think if people would try to stop turning Slackware it isn't designed to be, we'd never have these issues. Slackware isn't Ubuntu, Fedora, or Arch, so trying to make it like them is going to raise some eyebrows.

Does Slackware need PAM to compete with other Server grade distributions? No it doesn't because you have all the tools to add PAM yourself, and there's tons of examples out there for setting it up.

Does Slackware need systemd to be a modern distribution? No it doesn't because systemd isn't even near completion yet in terms, and Slackware already is modern with it's packages and strong community support levels.

So what does Slackware need? Nothing but a willingness to learn to do for yourself with the tools provided.

There's no problem with creating optional packages, but when someone tries to push optional as required, it's going to draw criticism, and it could be harsh.

Systemd is a constitutional change. If this were politics you'd need an Amendment to get it accepted. Yet here we are having it applied by a few to the majority. This is rather familiar territory - large changes forced on the majority, at the behest of a minority, with all debate shut down or reduced to rock chucking matches. This is how politics is now run, it's therefore of little surprise that its bleeding into software - after all, it's the Corporate influence that has led to this situation, whether in politics or software.

there are people with strong opinions and rude language, if they have education and knowledge, like say Linus, than this is ok, but the people here that try to copy this and use rude language and share their strong opinions show only their lack of knowledge and education, telling every one stupid, using as* and F* words when someone points them to facts and bring proves, those people show only their bad education, limited knowledge and their bad habits.
The handful of people that here explaining the world how a Linux system has to be, from which most of course do not even spend their most time on Linux, floating each thread here with their FUD, paranoia, simple nonsense and technical incompetence are a shame for Slackware. If you want to bring Slackware user into a bad light you need just to quote from this thread was several people have written here, how embarrassing. You think you do something good to Slackware and Linunx, acting like radical ultra orthodox fanatics, arguing with FUD, paranoia, technical incompetence and strong cool language, scaring away everyone who is not on your radical trip? how disgusting, but of course you will have success.

Interesting that you should mention politics and corporate influence in the context of this discussion:

https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2014...ed-by-the-nsa/

Some interesting points in the article.

Let me add a last post before giving up on this ugly thread with its ugly Subject line.

You are ignoring the use-case for PAM.
If you have the time to tinker with your Slackware system and add PAM in a meaningful way, then that is not trivial, takes time, and introduces a maintenance burden because your computer may refuse to let you in after any official Slackware update if the "wrong" package gets updated and you did not notice. Also, this is a typical case where you are not going to have any use for PAM, since tinkering usually means, you are dealing with a single-user system.

Requiring someone like kikinovak to add PAM himself seems reasonable, because he can make a decision between the added work load of maintaining out-of-tree Slackware packages versus the increased functionality he can offer his customers (aka increasing revenue). Still, this strategy will introduce "islands" of non-standard Slackware setups that are hard to troubleshoot because if you post your issues here at LQ, none of us will be able to help because of the unknown implementation.
PAM is not evil despite rumors of the past. If implemented in a proper way, it will not add complexity to your computer. In its simplest implementation, you can just continue with your user management the way you are used even with PAM inbetween, while allowing others to add more complex authentication schemes without having to rebuild several core packages.

firewalld is not a part of systemd. If you have problems with firewalld you may better contact its author instead of bothering the systemd people.

Please present your numbers on that, I would really like to see them.

And someone who is willing to maintain the software that Slackware uses, in case the mentioned software is abandoned by the original developers. And someone who is willing to maintain the codepaths in the dependent projects that are using said software.

I read something like this over and over again, but I still don't get it. Please explain to me how the few systemd developers have applied (others would say "forced down the throat") systemd to all the distributions that have made the change.

Well, I think that they 'forced' people to change to systemd when they merged udev. If udev were still out there (it is now systemd) we wouldn't have this humongous thread discussing it since Slackware could continue to use it without being pushed down to systemd to get security updates and bug corrections. Options to udev are appearing, but a lot of distributions did not want to wait and rushed to systemd.

It is still possible to get the latest version of udev without systemd. Robby Workman provides Slackware packages, AFAIK.

Wait, I have already heard myself saying the very same thing several times. Yeah, I was in a bad dream, arguing with this guy :D


Cheers

The problem is the 'still'. Slackware try not to patch packages as many as possible, and so do others. Systemd never promised to keep udev compatible with the old one. Distributions were wanting to update sysvinit (systemd, upstart, etc) so that users without knowledge could more easily manage their systems, the announce of the merge of udev was just what they needed to rush to systemd since they was wanting for something like it and they do not want to patch udev. Of course they were not FORCED, but you can't say the systemd people made it easy for them merging udev and cutting the time that they would analyze the alternatives in about two years.

It boils down to the question of who is funding the whole FOSS/GNU/Linux show. Who makes all this "free" stuff possible? Just follow the money. And you know what is going on in the ecosystem and why. :)