They did a good job [LWN.net]

They did a good job

Posted Oct 10, 2015 9:24 UTC (Sat) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118)
In reply to: They did a good job by nix
Parent article: How Debian managed the systemd transition

If it's not documented, how can it be "intended"? How can you judge if the behavior is correct and it is not a bug? See also encrypted swap support in article – it was another bug exposed by systemd.

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They did a good job

Posted Oct 10, 2015 9:49 UTC (Sat) by cebewee (guest, #94775) [Link] (1 responses)

A behavior does not need to be "intended" to be relied upon. It suffices if this behavior is consistently exposed. Then a change has a high chance of breaking user expectations. Quoting dlang's comment:

> you should read Ingo's comments from the kernel qotw http://lwn.net/Articles/657428/

Now, there are of course cases where breaking changes are justified (and I won't judge whether this was the case here), but you cannot blame people for being upset when said changes break their system.

They did a good job

Posted Oct 11, 2015 0:15 UTC (Sun) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

One of systemd's goals is to make a layer for Linux that can be depended upon. Minor differences like this are the "death by 1000 papercuts" that makes cross-distro deployment a pain. Breaking every other distro in the same way Debian has for years is certainly not the better solution here. More docs would have been better. Even better would be some check in the updater about possible semantic changes in /etc/fstab entries.