On Tue, 2010-08-24 at 12:02 -0500, Eric Sandeen wrote: > > Well, ironically enough, Lennart's last big revolution illustrates the > > problem with that. PulseAudio - previously PolypAudio, remember - was > > 'opt-in' for several releases; it was packaged in Fedora and many other > > major distributions, you could enable it just by installing it. It was > > used by approximately no-one. People just don't opt in to big bits of > > infrastructural change unless they have some very specific reason to do > > so; booting the system more or less works for most people, so why would > > they 'opt in' to a new init daemon? > > If it's worth the revolution, wouldn't people choose to opt in? > > If nobody ever opts in, perhaps it's not worth the revolution? No, not really, for a couple of reasons. One, consider the sets of people involved. systemd opens up interesting possibilities for operating system creators (that's us) and possibly sysadmins. Neither of those groups is very large, and certainly both pale in comparison to the total number of people who will ultimately be *affected*, if only passively, by the change (which includes both the above groups, plus all other users). Even for operating system creators and sysadmins, there's factors to inhibit switching as long as it's just an optional alternative. We can't build anything into Fedora that relies on systemd unless it's the default, obviously. And sysadmins are generally fairly conservative beasts (that's the point some of them are whaling on here on this list) who prefer to change as little as possible about a working system. I'd say it's generally true that, if you get people using Foobar 1.0, then branch out and offer Foobar 1.x and Foobar 2.x where 1.x is just maintenance for 1.0 and 2.x has all the shiny new features but some adjustment shock, people will look at 2.x briefly, think 'ow, it's different!' and just carry on using 1.x. If you take away 1.x and only offer 2.x they will migrate to it, whine for a week about what's different, then quickly forget about it and start realizing the changes offer them something neat and useful. Not saying it's a foregone conclusion that that's how it'll go with systemd, but I think it's worth considering. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
