On 06/24/2014 04:20 PM, Dimitris Papastamos wrote: > > Systemd is not the only issue. >
Specifically, maintaining a stable platform is something of an impossibility. Upstream fixes are too-rarely backported (and what the **** else would I use a distro for?), and so when Heartbleed_2.0 or whatever comes out, rather than just having it fixed with a security update in my existing stack, I end up having to install the upstream version bump that fixes it, which pulls in libfoo3.0, foo-gobject-introspection, and of course systemd. There was one point a few years ago (back when I used Arch) where one morning I ran pacman -Syu (or whatever it is) and _it removed HAL_. (No possible chance I could still need _that_, right?) Arch has what I call a "Heraclitus problem" (from his aphorism "you can't step in the same river twice"). It moves too fast and explicitly doesn't have a goal of being a stable platform. When you're an admin, bleeding edge just leaves you bloody. It's like running Sid -- and I knew Ubuntu was going to be a disaster when I read Shuttleworth talking about "the joys of Sid"... oy vey... Ruby has that too. I'm not much of a programmer, but I'm an admin who manages the platforms programmers use. I want to know that a system I install today will be useable in 2 or 3 years. Back when I was in a Ruby shop, that got me laughed out of meetings, because rails or rind or radish or whatever the devs were using released incompatible major version bumps _every 6 months_ in some cases. (Yes, I know, always roll and freeze your own development stack, but still...) Frankly the least suckfull distro I am familiar with is the venerable Slackware, which is still full of suck, but full of vanilla suck that I'm familiar with and is predictable across upgrades. YMMV, of course.
