Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Linux greybeards release beta of systemd-free Debian fork

theregister.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 189 posts

Re: Linux greybeards release beta of systemd-free Debian fork

#41

Post by Sanddancer »

INTPenis wrote: post #18

I can't believe anyone would like to keep using sysvinit-scripts or RC-scripts. I love bash, I love nitpicking about how to use bash along with the other bash nazis in #bash@freenode. But I would never put myself through sysvinit again. I thoroughly enjoy using distros like CentOS 7, Fedora 23, RHEL7. They're a joy to manage and work with, in part thanks to Systemd. I never want to debug, troubleshoot, or even look a…

I'd argue that one of the biggest things that made sysvinit so ugly was that distro maintainers didn't enforce any type of startup script hygiene. Take a look at BSD-style init scripts some time. They're beautiful in their simplicity and readability. They source a common set of functions, have well-defined variables to control execution, and end up with a length about that of systemd units, without sacrificing the power of shell scripting. Systemd threw the baby out with the bathwater, and just makes diagnosing boot problems all that more difficult when you have to start tracing through magic symlinks.

Re: Linux greybeards release beta of systemd-free Debian fork

#42

Post by lottin »

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #38
etiam wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem sort of is that (the rest of) Debian wouldn't work with them on this.

I thought the Debian people had a vote and the choice was to go with systemd.

It was a technical committee who took the decision, if I recall correctly.

Re: Linux greybeards release beta of systemd-free Debian fork

#43

Post by tmptmp »

toast0 wrote: post #33
afarrell wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> getting pushed around by end-user focus is way too unacceptable behavior why?

It seems that GNOME had developed a strong dependency on systemd, which drove the whole process. I'm guessing "end-user" here means desktop user. I've used debian as a desktop and a server, and in the past it's been pretty easy to have it fill both roles; at this point though, systemd is basically forced onto a server system which involves a lot of changes and very little improvements for the server environment: the…

Thanks for clarifying "end-user" here means desktop user. I did mean desktop user. It's so sad that the Debian community chose to ignore server users to achieve the goal of pleasing desktop users. Servers and many other users do not need the gnome at all.

Re: Linux greybeards release beta of systemd-free Debian fork

#44

Post by rubiquity »

jcoffland wrote: post #28

One giant program to rule them all was never the Unix way. System's monolithic architecture will be its downfall. Rather than stabilize I predict that systemd will get more and more complicated and eventualy fall due to unwieldy maintenance problems at which point someone will come up with a better more modular system.

The Linux kernel itself is a a monolithic kernel and it beat out Hurd which was a micro kernel. I would say Linux has a history of certain programs being monolithic being a good thing.

Re: Linux greybeards release beta of systemd-free Debian fork

#45

Post by guitarbill »

lottin wrote: post #23
INTPenis wrote: post #18

I can't believe anyone would like to keep using sysvinit-scripts or RC-scripts. I love bash, I love nitpicking about how to use bash along with the other bash nazis in #bash@freenode. But I would never put myself through sysvinit again. I thoroughly enjoy using distros like CentOS 7, Fedora 23, RHEL7. They're a joy to manage and work with, in part thanks to Systemd. I never want to debug, troubleshoot, or even look a…

I've been using Linux for the last 15 years and I don't remember ever having to fiddle with any init scripts.

Until you install something like Gerrit, or GoCD, which have absolutely appalling init scripts. And then you find out that e.g. Gerrit sets some ulimits in the init script. Yuck!

Re: Linux greybeards release beta of systemd-free Debian fork

#46

Post by jcoffland »

rubiquity wrote: post #44
jcoffland wrote: post #28

One giant program to rule them all was never the Unix way. System's monolithic architecture will be its downfall. Rather than stabilize I predict that systemd will get more and more complicated and eventualy fall due to unwieldy maintenance problems at which point someone will come up with a better more modular system.

The Linux kernel itself is a a monolithic kernel and it beat out Hurd which was a micro kernel. I would say Linux has a history of certain programs being monolithic being a good thing.

Hurd has failed after many years to produce a kernel even nearly as complete as Linux.

Re: Linux greybeards release beta of systemd-free Debian fork

#47

Post by chris_wot »

jcoffland wrote: post #28

One giant program to rule them all was never the Unix way. System's monolithic architecture will be its downfall. Rather than stabilize I predict that systemd will get more and more complicated and eventualy fall due to unwieldy maintenance problems at which point someone will come up with a better more modular system.

systemd has neither a monolithic architecture, nor does the systemd process itself do anything other than the following:

"[systemd] provides a system and service manager that runs as PID 1 and starts the rest of the system. systemd provides aggressive parallelization capabilities, uses socket and D-Bus activation for starting services, offers on-demand starting of daemons, keeps track of processes using Linux control groups, supports snapshotting and restoring of the system state, maintains mount and automount points and implements an elaborate transactional dependency-based service control logic." [1]

It comes with a set of utilities that do a lot of things. But that doesn't make it monolithic. In fact, systemd is actually extremely modular.

Ironically, systemd has not gotten any harder to use since it was introduced, at least IMHO, but I guess as with anything YMMV.

But this myth about systemd being monolithic, it really needs to stop because it's not correct.

1. https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/

Re: Linux greybeards release beta of systemd-free Debian fork

#48

Post by cfallin »

geofft wrote: post #34
jcoffland wrote: post #28

One giant program to rule them all was never the Unix way. System's monolithic architecture will be its downfall. Rather than stabilize I predict that systemd will get more and more complicated and eventualy fall due to unwieldy maintenance problems at which point someone will come up with a better more modular system.

Wasn't it? Multics was the modular system, Unix was the one where they said "That's silly, let's stick everything in a single kernel and not bother with all the flexibility because we don't need it." People seem to ignore the kernel for some reason, but it is literally one giant program to rule them all, and it works very well. There have been many efforts to modularize it and move most of the complexity into indepen…

The thing is that the kernel, while large, has one defined purpose -- to provide abstractions of hardware resources and arbitrate those resources between programs -- and thus conceptual simplicity, even if the source tree is huge. The POSIX syscall API is simple and the rest is just implementation.

In contrast, systemd is conceptually complex -- its scope continues to expand to manage every little nook and cranny and configurable tidbit in the system. (I'm not arguing one way or another, just pointing out that the type of complexity is different.)

Re: Linux greybeards release beta of systemd-free Debian fork

#49

Post by cyphar »

rubiquity wrote: post #44
jcoffland wrote: post #28

One giant program to rule them all was never the Unix way. System's monolithic architecture will be its downfall. Rather than stabilize I predict that systemd will get more and more complicated and eventualy fall due to unwieldy maintenance problems at which point someone will come up with a better more modular system.

The Linux kernel itself is a a monolithic kernel and it beat out Hurd which was a micro kernel. I would say Linux has a history of certain programs being monolithic being a good thing.

Linux is a kernel. Monolithic and micro kernel architectures are a different problem to the Unix philosophy which specifically concerns design of userspace programs. I don't see how having pipes between kernel components would be a useful feature for a user.

Also, the userspace of GNU/Linux isn't called Linux. Linux isn't an operating system.

Re: Linux greybeards release beta of systemd-free Debian fork

#50

Post by chris_wot »

hiddennetwork wrote: post #40
INTPenis wrote: post #18

I can't believe anyone would like to keep using sysvinit-scripts or RC-scripts. I love bash, I love nitpicking about how to use bash along with the other bash nazis in #bash@freenode. But I would never put myself through sysvinit again. I thoroughly enjoy using distros like CentOS 7, Fedora 23, RHEL7. They're a joy to manage and work with, in part thanks to Systemd. I never want to debug, troubleshoot, or even look a…

BSD handles all of this better than Linux. Text file. Easy. Linux has grown far too "complex". I like how OpenBSD adds modern touches yet keeps the OS free from binary blobs. systemd addresses some issues, but at the cost of complexity. I dislike binary blobs in my systems, hence, my servers run OpenBSD.

What binary blobs are you referring to? Aside from the, uh, binaries that run systemd, systemd services, and systemd utilities, the only other thing that is binary that I'm aware of is the binary log file, which can be reconfigured to revert to text if you so desire.
Post reply on HN