Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 14th May 2012 13:55 UTC
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The point is whether you have resources for that.
You can propel indefinitely good architectures only if you have infinite experienced developer input.
I don't have any study at hand but the gut feeling is that Linux desktop developer supply have gotten quite a blow recently that one could attribute OSX and IOS popularity.
With limited resources at hand and tougher than ever competition (from both MS and Apple) that threaten putting all those efforts on brink of irrelevance, tough decisions have to be made.
The point is whether you have resources for that.
You can propel indefinitely good architectures only if you have infinite experienced developer input.
You can propel indefinitely good architectures only if you have infinite experienced developer input.
Perhaps, but in this case they did get the developer feedback. If they don't get the architecture right now, they will risk bloat by spaghetti code in the long run and it will be that much harder to switch away from systemd.
Building a correct architecture is easy, the real difficulty lies in having a vision and planning ahead for possible scenario's and changes that may impact that architecture. Things that are overlooked now, will cause trouble later. That's why it's a good thing that non-Linux developers are alarmed about the hard dependency. Now is the time to get things right without too much hassle.




Member since:
2009-07-18
Requiring dependencies on optional components (what does the boot process have to do with a desktop?) is typically a sign of a bad software architecture.
A better design is modular so that you can add extra functionality on Linux but still keep it operational on other systems as well (either without that specific functionality or with a similar one specific to that system). Having a hard requirement is just lazy and such an attitude typically leads to code that is less stable, harder to maintain and more difficult to adapt if systemd is replaced by the next best thing.
From my own experience, keeping cross platform/compiler compatibility is a good thing even if you care about one platform only. Not just from a programming point of view, it also keeps options open for the future.
Edited 2012-05-14 15:29 UTC