Mon, 13 Jul 2015
Systemd Developer Attitude
Systemd. Some people love it, some people hate it. My own position is somewhere in between: I think many things they are trying to solve are real problems which need solutions, the system should "just work" for common use without the configuration, etc. But sometimes the overall attitude of the systemd developers is just plain wrong. The following bug report shows the problem pretty clearly:
timeX.google.com provide non standard time - issue #437
TL;DR: it can be summarized as follows:
systemd-timeduses Google time servers by default.- These time servers are sometimes wrong because of the non-standard "leap second smearing" done by Google.
- Google has asked that their servers are not set up as defaults in
systemd-timed.
There are several solutions to this problem which I would consider clean and fair:
- Remove the default time servers from the configuration, let the user decide (e.g. to use a NTP pool).
- Register a NTP pool vendor zone and use it as defaults.
- Let somebody else register and maintain a NTP pool vendor zone (CoreOS people offered to do this).
The systemd maintainer's response was "we are not a vendor, we don't want a vendor pool", and "let's add a warning when somebody uses the defaults". I think using Google servers against the will of their owner is pretty rude, and having the defaults which need to be replaced, even though the possibility of having sane defaults exists, to be inconsiderate to their users.
In my opinion, the above clearly shows the attitude of systemd developers towards the rest of the world.