[GoLUG] Mailing list, long term.

[Steve Litt]

On Thu, 21 Aug 2025 17:35:23 -0700
Kyle Terrien <kyle at terren.us> wrote:

> I have asked Red Hat people why they didn’t delegate the service
> manager to a separate process, and the response was that such a design
> would break inheritance of SELinux and cgroup contexts.  A service
> manager would need all the privileges in order to setup SELinux and
> cgroup contexts of services.

Every day they come up with a new reason. Many of the few who have been
using cgroups were using them before systemd, and as a LUG member in
contact with over 10 LUGs I never heard anybody talk about cgroups
before systemd used them as a reason to switch. I believe people were
using SELinux before systemd too.

In the 27 years I've been using Linux, many times in groups with
professional big iron (old word for "enterprise") developers and
admins, the only times I've heard the word "cgroup" were in conjunction
with systemd.

SELinux came out December 22, 2000, 8 years before poettering
created the first version of systemd:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security-Enhanced_Linux

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd

The systemd cheerleaders routinely justify their April Fools
architecture by trotting out "you can't do X without doing Y", which
is usually complete nonsense. If that doesn't work they start yapping
about stuff from the bowels of systemd to make them sound smart,
rather than admitting the job could be better done outside both PID1
and the process supervisor/manager. In the following video, time code
23:00 to 25:08, native German Wolfgang Draxinger, who can barely speak
English, wipes the floor with Lennart Poettering, who is a lot
better at English than software design. My favorite part is at 24:53,
when Wolgang responds to an argumentative Poettering, "Do you know
what shellscripts are?" Bang, mike drop, knockout. Poettering mutters
and sputters and then resorts to a few half hearted Ad hominem
fallacies and the use of the word "simple" as a bad thing.

The entire video shows the rudeness of Poettering, who is a mere
audience member.

Everybody interested in the systemd debate should read the following:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies#Informal_fallacies

Besides helping understand the debate, it will help in every other
aspect of life.

SteveT

Steve Litt 
Spring 2023 featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques of the Successful
Technologist http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques