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

Systemd Sucks, Long Live Systemd

naftuli.wtf

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 272 posts

Re: Systemd Sucks, Long Live Systemd

#21

Post by djsumdog »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #10

I feel like at some point, news aggregation sites will need moratoriums on this topic. Systemd is an architectural decision with very philosophical effects, so by its very nature be very divisive. I'm, personally, not a fan at all of systemd, but am tired of seeing these stupid arguments everywhere all the time. There are plenty of places to find competent summaries of both the technical and political arguments for a…

I don't feel they should. These are arguments I haven't heard before either and I'm glad to see more of these weird cases laid out.

I run Gentoo (OpenRC) and Void (Runit) on my own systems, and although I do like both of them, I find the total lack of alternatives to the systemd ecosystem troubling.

As a package maintainer, I do like being able to create rpms/deb files and only needing one standardized init script, so there is are a few advantages to systemd, but not many. It's complexity makes it difficult to create drop in replacements (work has stopped on uselessd and others).

There needs to be more community support for distros like Void and real alternatives. Articles like this encourage that kind of thinking.

Re: Systemd Sucks, Long Live Systemd

#22

Post by CaptSpify »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #10

I feel like at some point, news aggregation sites will need moratoriums on this topic. Systemd is an architectural decision with very philosophical effects, so by its very nature be very divisive. I'm, personally, not a fan at all of systemd, but am tired of seeing these stupid arguments everywhere all the time. There are plenty of places to find competent summaries of both the technical and political arguments for a…

I would have to argue that if it keeps getting up-voted, perhaps it means that the conversation is still relevant to a lot of people

Re: Systemd Sucks, Long Live Systemd

#24

Post by ashark »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #14

I'd probably respect SystemD a lot more if it measured itself against a modern init system like Gentoo's OpenRC instead of pretending it's invented dependency handling. https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Comparison_of_init_systems > OpenRC provides a number of features touted as innovative by recent init systems like systemd ...

OpenRC's the only init system I've actually liked. It's one of the things I really miss from when I used Gentoo, and I don't know why more distros didn't adopt it years ago.

Re: Systemd Sucks, Long Live Systemd

#25

Post by quickben »

xenadu02 wrote: post #13
aaronky wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hated systemd when I had to start using it. It tries to do way too much. The antithesis of the the Unix philosophy. Journalctl grew on me though.

Who said the unit philosophy was the be-all, end-all? Unix doesn't even believe it's own philosophy because it's too damn painful. Why does ls do sorting? Why does grep do -R recursive searching? How is that "Do one thing and do it well"? Unix is just a collection of random decisions made by various people over the years. The Unix philosophy is really more like "I've always done it that way so don't you dare change i…

"The C compilation model of separate header files is not a good design"

This is probably just your lack of experience not having worked on 50+ million LOC compiling for 12 hours and not having anything else as a better option. There is a reason these things exist.

Re: Systemd Sucks, Long Live Systemd

#26

Post by skissane »

jjnoakes wrote: post #18
xenadu02 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who said the unit philosophy was the be-all, end-all? Unix doesn't even believe it's own philosophy because it's too damn painful. Why does ls do sorting? Why does grep do -R recursive searching? How is that "Do one thing and do it well"? Unix is just a collection of random decisions made by various people over the years. The Unix philosophy is really more like "I've always done it that way so don't you dare change i…

Most of this comment is incorrect.

I think xenadu02 raises some valid criticisms, but I think those criticisms would have been better received if they were expressed more politely.

I'd love to see a rebuttal of the specific points made as opposed to just "Most of this comment is incorrect".

Re: Systemd Sucks, Long Live Systemd

#27

Post by djsumdog »

agumonkey wrote: post #20

Systemd ideas I'm all for but it only hints at linux lack of clean abstraction power. sysvinit was full of redundancy; apparently BSD found a way to make a thin abstraction layer to make init files clean. Bash isn't "good" at hinting proper abstractions, I rarely see talks about this, maybe gurus can see through the rain. I keep seeing a place for a tiny lambda friendly intermediate layer .. Just so you can compose p…

Have you looked at the runit init system? Here is /etc/sv/sshd/run on void linux:

    #!/bin/sh
    ssh-keygen -A >/dev/null 2>&1 # Will generate host keys if they don't already exist
    [ -r conf ] && . ./conf
    exec /usr/bin/sshd -D $OPTS
Service scripts are dead simple on Void.

Re: Systemd Sucks, Long Live Systemd

#28

Post by pmahoney »

kalenx wrote: post #3
Esau wrote: post #2

I don't care for SystemD for the same reasons that I don't like MacOS's init system: it an opaque, confusing mess.

As are most Bash init files with InitV... At some point we should consider that the init system as a whole (including the configuration scripts for each daemon) _is_ complicated and often confusing. In this regard, writing something like SystemD to elegantly handle most of the usecases is actually a good idea.

Many comments seem to only compare systemd with SysV init. But there is a whole world of process supervisors out there, particularly in the daemontools[1] family.

systemd is a process supervisor plus additional features; sysv init is not a process supervisor (though the "init" program as configured in /etc/inittab is a supervisor). At a minimum, a process supervisor starts processes and restarts them should they exit.

Some modern daemontools-family systems with additional features beyond basic supervision that put them in the same category as systemd are nosh[2] and s6-rc[3]. These two systems (and all the daemontools family), in contrast to systemd, are not monolithic, but composed of multiple smaller programs.

Notably, they depend on the shell (any script or executable, but traditionally small shell scripts) to perform actions like setting up environment variables, switching to a less privileged user, redirecting output, etc. while systemd has created a large and growing set of directives[4] to accomplish these. This set of directives is one of my annoyances with systemd. As someone familiar with the shell, I find it annoying to learn yet another language (systemd directives) for expressing the same thing, though I recognize not everyone is familiar with shell.

[1] http://cr.yp.to/daemontools.html

[2] http://jdebp.info./Softwares/nosh/

[3] http://skarnet.org/software/s6-rc/

[4] https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.dir...

Re: Systemd Sucks, Long Live Systemd

#29

Post by CaptSpify »

I'll put my opinion in the middle ground with systemd as well. I like a lot about it, and I dislike a lot about it. I really think the best thing they could have done would have been to make it modular. If people could just turn off the "features" that they don't want, there wouldn't be so much bitching about it.

Instead they keep trying to shove everything into one giant pile, and don't understand why people get upset.

Post reply on HN