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Comment by grifaton | Hacker News Reader

What's the back story here?

Lennart is a Fedora dev known for writing replacements for linux subsystems. For example, he started PulseAudio and systemd, a replacement for init. Recently, he's suggested a replacement for syslog where the logs aren't written as plain text.

I would guess the last one was the impetus for this petition.

I don't understand what the big deal is. If his systems aren't useful distros won't adopt them and no harm is done. If they are useful and distros adopt them then he has advanced the state of the entire Linux community.

This petition seems childish.

He's a Red Hat employee so everything he does ends up in Fedora at some point.

Don't use Fedora?

What's a better use of my time -- converting my 1000+ machines to another distro (which may turn out to be worse) or convincing Fedora not to make a stupid decision?

If you don't like Fedora switching away from it will be more productive then fighting it on every change for all eternity.

If you don't like this change, you probably also don't like the other Fedora changes that came in the past and surely also in the future, so yeah I'm with sjs. In the long time you will save time if you switch to a distribution that aligns with your choices.

Plus, you can do a dry-run with a limited number of machines and you can select a distribution which seldom changes (Gentoo switched to baselayout2 after.. years, Slackware still has tarballs as packages). Unlikely that they will push radical changes soon.

A non-plain text syslog? That sounds stupid to me. Plain text is one of the reasons I love Unix in the first place.

Yup, incredible stupid. That means it will go into Fedora.

So who of you actually read Lennarts blog postings about the rationale? Or do you just dismiss it because SYSV didn't do that, some fourty years ago?

If I wanted non-plain text logging, I'd use Windows. And I like BSD (I have never liked the SYS-V init system).

So your argument is you want plaintext because you want plaintext?

I replaced the BSD-like init system in Arch, because it is buggy. And I can dual-boot init-systems now.

I read it. The benefits are awfully dubious, and the downside is significant. It reinvents a wheel in the most literal sense. It claims to fix problems that are already addressed, or are easily addressable, in the current implementation and derivatives like rsyslog.

Lennart's not even planning on documenting the format.

Stupidity, in a word (attacking a single person in this way).

If you ask for possible reasons to attack Lennart in the first place: He was the main force behind Pulseaudio (which, for various technical and political reasons was reviled for a long time) and now systemd (a C replacement for the sys-v scripts, think smf/launchd).

The only reason people hated PulseAudio was because Ubuntu shipped it as their default sound system a year or two before it was ready. Now it's a pretty mature sound system that works well (at least with all the Linux hardware I have)...

"A year or two before it was ready", people like Lennart were already advocating it as The One True Way for Linux audio, so I don't blame Ubuntu for jumping the gun.

Besides, looking at how things go in that area, now that it works well enough it will probably be replaced quite soon.

i don't have an opinion on the larger fight here, but you have to disable pulseaudio if you want a fast startup in opensuse 12.1 (otherwise there's a 30s pause when the desktop starts). disabled, everything seems fine.

FWIW, my laptop, running Fedora, boots to the desktop in 15s total, with pulseaudio. I would sooner attribute that to a problem with the suse init system (every time I've dug into the suse init scripts, I've found horribly absurd decisions) than I would pulseaudio.

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