It appears I was mistaken – systemd does announce changes to internal interfaces on their mailing list although I can’t be bothered to find out how much warning they give – but I believe my point stands. Regardless of whether he gives adequate warning, he’s still very much a dick about it (“gentoo users, this is your wakeup call”) and he still seems to be doing the embrace-extend-extinguish thing. It used to be possible to run systemd-logind without systemd – it no longer is – and that mail I just linked is about making udev hard dependent as well.

Of course Poettering does not do all the development himself, but he does lead the project and it is his hubris and inability to accept that one size does not fit all that is responsible for the project being as hostile to outside implementations as it is.

Again, it’s not the systemd project making alternatives to widely used applications and daemons (or even bringing development of those applications under the systemd umbrella) that I mind. It’s Poettering’s “my way or the highway” attitude and apparent belief that if your system is not either 0% systemd or 100% systemd then you do not deserve to have a system that works.