I'll admit that I don't actively seek out Poettering's online postings, so I pretty much only see his behavior when it's bad enough to make the news. But isn't it a little silly to say he's generally polite and helpful in most of his interactions? What really matters is whether he's capable of being polite and helpful when there's a real disagreement, and especially when he's wrong. His reputation indicates he tends to have a distinctly impolite "my way or the highway" attitude in those circumstances, and examples of it are plentiful. Are there counterexamples where he humbly admits being wrong, or at least acknowledges the validity of criticism when affirming his stance?
Even before systemd, Poettering was one of the more uncaring, abrasive project maintainers, e.g. in pulseaudio. If there is no slack for Torvalds, there shouldn't be for Poettering.
I don’t care if Poettering's an a—hole or not. I enjoy reading Torvald’s rants, in fact. They’re usually informative.
I’m upset that he has done more than any other developer to break my machines, and he keeps getting more authority so screw things up.
PulseAudio was bad enough, but at least it only broke one subsystem. SystemD has unapologetically broken: background process management, time keeping, network resolution, pam authentication, screen saver session management, x11 startup, logging, and probably more.
> I’m upset that he has done more than any other developer to break my machines, and he keeps getting more authority so screw things up.
I may be wrong, but you should be blaming the ones who made the _actual_ decision of replacing whichever init system, with systemd.
systemd was developed under Red Hat's umbrella. Nowadays, the vast majority of mainstream Linux distributions use it, and I doubt it was because Red Hat/Poettering pressure them to do so.
I would expect that an experienced leader would have learned the lesson that the satisfaction of writing a nasty comment is short but the consequences are much longer, not sure if he just can't control himself or maybe he enjoys the spectacle and making himself a "victim".
The guy is paid for his work so I would have expect he would act more professional, the excuse that he works for free in his spare time does not apply.
I wouldn't consider any of those responses as being "generally polite", He could have just said we already discussed this, linked to the old discussion and thanked the people for their concern and closed the issue, no need for him to respond with nasty language.
How about we cut them a little slack for occassionally being human?