Downvoting this post is unwarranted. Everything that Lennart Poettering has ever done was an unreliable clusterfuck[1] astray from the Unix philosphy. There's nothing that he has ever done that is considered "good" by a majority of Unix-derivative users.
I remember watching this video and Poettering's argument were very sound and he has managed to repel most (if not all) Draxinger's points.
The problem with "it's not the UNIX way" argument is that a lot of people don't care about UNIX that much, they just want a good system. Poettering mentions in that video that all his, and his colleagues' work (pulseaudio, consolekit, udev into udisks/upower) has been done because there was an actual demand for those features. There is a reason why most distributions use their work even as people complain about them.
I'm not going to watch this cringeworthy thing again, but i can remember than he insisted that dbus was useful and that we need a gnome session in our login manager. That would be enough to proof the point.
And the point is that the arguments he made about why dbus is useful (a lightweight IPC mechanism with use cases not covered by UNIX sockets or TCP sockets, doing much more) and why do we need a gnome session on the gdm (to get i18n, network and accessibility features you need most if not all of the session) are well reasoned and make sense to us out of the loop.
Yes. dbus effectively breaks network transparency of x11 apps and turns Linux into a Desktop-Single-User OS. While I'm not regually writing desktop applications i have never ever missed dbus. And ipc mechanisms have a tendency to become unpleasant (Corba, SOAP).
I don't have a gnome session in my login manager because I don't need i18n for the words "login" and "password". (although that would be totally possible without a whole gnome session). I don't have a braille line so i can't say anything about accessibility, but that should be (in a ideal unix world) a single printf to /dev/braille. Also the feedback is audible and visual, this seems to be no issue to me.
Accessibility is actually a requirement in many countries (per law). Obviously not everyone needs it, but just that you do not need it doesn't negate that others do.
Edit: Plus saying X breaks Y so X is not needed is not a good argument. Because you have not addressed if X is needed or not, only said that Y breaks.
I have no idear how "accessibility" is defined. I'd say getty is quite accessible, but well, I don't know, I never relied on it. But yet, that is no excuse to start a hole desktop. Just like a program can use gtk (theoretically) without a gnome desktop it should be able to do the same with for a braille display.
I think I can safely say that if X breaks Y, and I need Y than X sucks. Especially if it worked before X came. X made things worse.
/edit:
I think that's why Poettering is hated so much. There was community on the Nixes, with their own ecosystem and their own way to do stuff. It's wasn't always beautiful or nice, but their had their way to solve stuff so it would a kind of blend in with the rest. And then Poettering wants to turn it into MacOS X or Windows and adds stuff new users probably appreciate, but the old users never misses. There is a cultural shock. And then it breaks backwards compatibility. It shouldn't suprise anybody that this product should rather be superb and not just medicore to accepted.
First, he denies that this is something people need. Then, when he is told that people need it, he says that they are just doing things the wrong way. Then, when people point out that this is neither unusual nor the wrong thing to want to do, he just repeats that this is not what was intended so too bad. He offers no advice on how to do things the right way despite being the only person who seems to think that everyone else is wrong.
I also find it telling how he closes the ticket asking everyone to go upstream and use PulseAudio's ticket system (http://www.pulseaudio.org/ticket/606), which gives me this error:
-------------------------------
Internal Server Error
TracError: IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/home/lennart/svn/trac/pulseaudio/VERSION'
So what is the homedir for? "Home directories for users". See 'man
hier'. This to me means it is not a directory for services.
This doesn't answer your question of course. There is still the 'why' of it.
Why has this become the standard?
The homedir is a volatile place. Where users reside often. And make changes
often. Any place humans change things is a place where stuff breaks easily and
on a regular basis. What if Lennard calls 'rm' with a wrong switch? Or chown?
Or chmod? The service receives pain.
Or he could decide that he no longer wants his homedir to be
readable/executable by everyone on the system, so he chmod 0700 his homedir.
Forgetting that this will render his trac instance unavailable.
Or what about sharing some responsibility? How is Lennard ever going to share
the maintenance of the ticketing system with anyone else? What impact will that
have on the ticketing system? Will it have to be migrated anyway to /srv or
/usr/local or /opt? What configs will that affect? What about the webserver
configs? What about file permissions, uids, gids?
What about backups? Are they configured for this specific service? If it is
ever migrated to another location, do they have to be reconfigured? Or will
/home/lennard just be backed up as before and no one will remember that trac is
now in /srv/trac, making a restore improbable.
What about a reboot? Will the service come back up? What if you have to
re-implement this service on another machine after this one explodes? Are you
sure you did not forget to point /etc/rc.local (or some other hack) to your new
machine?
These are only the reasons I could think of off the top of my head. And most of
these are actual examples from the field.
A standard is a standard, because it works for more people than just you. The
question you, and lennard, should be asking yourself is: How can these
standards work for me as well?
(As you can probably tell, I grew up in Ops, not Dev. I have seen the pain of
the 'works-for-me'-mentality.)
Also, cnvogel is obviously more consise than me. :-)
I think a lot of the benefits you get by running services on separated paths, as special-purpose users, ... is that you minimize side-effects provoked by work on other parts of the system.
For data shared by sevaral users, I very much prefer some separate /data/service/instance/... structure. Also much easier to allocate sane directory permissions.
One reason is that pulseaudio broke audio for many Linux users (including me). Linux audio has long been problematic but had reached a point of stability when pulseaudio was adopted by some of the major distributions. I have no idea if the problem was that pulseaudio was broken, with distributors messing up, or with Linux audio drivers.
When a problem is easily solved by just an "apt-get remove X" it is easy to start hating the piece of software. No matter who was actually at fault.
The thing is that this is a really dated opinion. While I realise that it was really painful for those months, the end result is that audio on Linux seems to work a hell of a lot better these days.
By making Linux audio temporarily problematic Linux audio became a solved problem (at least in my mind, and the minds of many users of the major distributions that use it)
Except its not dated at all. I have constant issues with PA randomly failing to do basic things like mixing, or outputting any sound at all on newest code releases. This is still a real problem for people, pretending it isnt and everything is solved and working because it works for you is an incredibly shitty attitude.
I receive all the bugs for Mageia. I don't notice bugreports for PulseAudio like what you describe. Seems very aggressive to suggest that someone has a "incredibly shitty attitude" just because someone has a different perception.
It does not seem that dated to me. Last time pulseaudio broke the sound at my computer was in two weeks ago on Debian Squeeze. Could have been a Debian fuckup, could be my hardware but whatever it was it was fixed with sudo apt-get remove pulseaudio.
I realize that is all anecdotal and I could be one of the few people in the world who still have problems with it.
Well, all software has problems. I just doubt that if problems were as prevalent as the vocal minority make out that PA would remain in the major distributions.
Not everyone has time to contribute to every project that may be useful in some way.
If something else works the way one wants, there's no call to put time and energy into a competing project.
You seem to be implicitly claiming that one only earns a right to critique the usability of a given piece of software if one is also capable of debugging and enhancing that software. Do you really believe that?
I don't like the taste of the food because I don't like the cook. Is that what are you defending? Secondly, you have to be an expert or at least knowledgeable to certain extent to talk about ingredients and style of cooking. Throwing 15 ingredients in a heated pan doesn't make you an excellent cook. Just because you can taste something delicious doesn't mean you will know everything about the that food.
This premise is flawed. There are certain ingredients that one just doesn't enjoy. If a dish is cooked with those ingredients, you won't like it regardless of the quality.
That's pretty much where my analogy falls apart, so I'm ditching it.
Whether I'm capable of contributing to a project that does not, in its current state, suit my needs has nothing to do with whether I'm in a position to contribute to that project.
This is especially true when there is an alternative that I'm already accustomed to using.
