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Devuan Jessie 1.0.0 stable release candidate

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Re: Devuan Jessie 1.0.0 stable release candidate

#21

Post by petre »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #18
Koshkin wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> standardized on systemd I sort of understand the reason for using systemd on desktop computers, where things may be rather volatile, but in a stable environment such as a server or a mainframe, the value that this complex piece of software brings to the table is not obvious to me; besides, others have mentioned that it is a sysadmin's nightmare, so...

>"others have mentioned that it is a sysadmin's nightmare" Any examples? If anything I'd expect systemd to make things easier for sysadmins, would be interested in finding out what challenges sysadmins face because of systemd.

For instance apache not restarting properly on openSuSE 13.2 when ServerName doesn't resolve properly for some reason.

Re: Devuan Jessie 1.0.0 stable release candidate

#22

Post by petre »

geofft wrote: post #20
Koshkin wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> standardized on systemd I sort of understand the reason for using systemd on desktop computers, where things may be rather volatile, but in a stable environment such as a server or a mainframe, the value that this complex piece of software brings to the table is not obvious to me; besides, others have mentioned that it is a sysadmin's nightmare, so...

I'm not super interested in rehashing the flamewar, so this is anecdata: from the perspective of sysadmin of thousands of physical machines, systemd has been a godsend. It gives me a standard way to supervise, gather log output from, and restart long-running-processes with dependencies on other processes. It's replaced a number of "sleep 10"s and "sleep 60"s that our infrastructure has grown over the years in shell s…

Most servers boot really slowly anyway (memory tests, raid cards etc), so why would anyone care if it takes one or ten seconds to boot Linux when the server boots in 120 seconds. Other init systems are capable of restarting things with dependencies as well, like BSD's rcng for instance. I am using runit to supervise my services since I can't rely on systemd.

Re: Devuan Jessie 1.0.0 stable release candidate

#23

Post by klez »

ratsz wrote: post #16
gareim wrote: post #2

I never understand when OSS projects give themselves names that will never go mainstream. If the goal is semi-popularity at least, then "Devuan" will not work.

I've heard it referred to as Dev1, which doesn't sound as bad.

Since the effort started from some Italian developers/sysadmins, I would be surprised if dev-one wasn't a good approximation of the correct pronunciation. As an Italian, that would be how I'd pronounce it.

Re: Devuan Jessie 1.0.0 stable release candidate

#24

Post by klez »

shouldbworking wrote: post #19
gareim wrote: post #2

I never understand when OSS projects give themselves names that will never go mainstream. If the goal is semi-popularity at least, then "Devuan" will not work.

I don't like it either. I think it's just that "vaun" is a rarely used sound in English. No real words end in vaun.

Vuan, not vaun. "Uan" would be pronounced as the number "one"

Re: Devuan Jessie 1.0.0 stable release candidate

#26

Post by duskwuff »

gareim wrote: post #2

I never understand when OSS projects give themselves names that will never go mainstream. If the goal is semi-popularity at least, then "Devuan" will not work.

As I noted on another thread, the choice to call their initial release "Jessie" is also bizarre -- that's the same as the release name for Debian 8.0, which was released in 2015. Between that and the project name (which is a typo of "Debian"), it all makes the project look like it's intentionally trying to create confusion between itself and Debian, rather than trying to succeed on its own merits.

Re: Devuan Jessie 1.0.0 stable release candidate

#27

Post by clarry »

geofft wrote: post #20
Koshkin wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> standardized on systemd I sort of understand the reason for using systemd on desktop computers, where things may be rather volatile, but in a stable environment such as a server or a mainframe, the value that this complex piece of software brings to the table is not obvious to me; besides, others have mentioned that it is a sysadmin's nightmare, so...

I'm not super interested in rehashing the flamewar, so this is anecdata: from the perspective of sysadmin of thousands of physical machines, systemd has been a godsend. It gives me a standard way to supervise, gather log output from, and restart long-running-processes with dependencies on other processes. It's replaced a number of "sleep 10"s and "sleep 60"s that our infrastructure has grown over the years in shell s…

This is just a personal anecdote, but so far systemd is the only init system ever to fail to reboot by first stopping all services it could (including sshd!) and then get infinitely stuck waiting on one problematic service. In the 12 years I've used Linux and OpenBSD, no other init systme ever did something like that.

What a nightmare that was to debug and fix.

I'll be happy to go with a system with fewer moving parts, even if that means reboots take a minute longer.

Re: Devuan Jessie 1.0.0 stable release candidate

#28

Post by geofft »

petre wrote: post #22
geofft wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not super interested in rehashing the flamewar, so this is anecdata: from the perspective of sysadmin of thousands of physical machines, systemd has been a godsend. It gives me a standard way to supervise, gather log output from, and restart long-running-processes with dependencies on other processes. It's replaced a number of "sleep 10"s and "sleep 60"s that our infrastructure has grown over the years in shell s…

Most servers boot really slowly anyway (memory tests, raid cards etc), so why would anyone care if it takes one or ten seconds to boot Linux when the server boots in 120 seconds. Other init systems are capable of restarting things with dependencies as well, like BSD's rcng for instance. I am using runit to supervise my services since I can't rely on systemd.

My experience with sysvinit is that it definitely takes well over ten seconds to boot Linux and start all services, especially if you've been putting "sleep 60" into certain scripts to make boot ordering reliable.

Again, I'm comparing systemd to pre-systemd Linux distros (including Devuan, which explicitly continues that tradition), not to systems broadly comparable to systemd. If Devuan had a different fancy init system or service manager (which could just be bundling runit configuration for everything the OS ships with) instead of an old-school init system + old-school init scripts, this would be a very different comparison.

Re: Devuan Jessie 1.0.0 stable release candidate

#29

Post by e12e »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #14
e12e wrote: post #9

"Devuan can be adopted as a flawless upgrade path from both Debian Wheezy and Jessie." That is nice, to have a supported path of simply add sources, signing keys and apt-get dist-upgrade. Impressive work. I'm personally not convinced there's a viable near future for Linux without systemd (not counting the mess that is android (as a potential workstation / server distro) - I think Debian/kFreeBSD is a better path. But…

> I think Debian/kFreeBSD is a better path. Is there an assumption that once Debian decided to go with systemd and an increasing amount of Debian standard software depended on it, the kFreeBSD port will have to be given up at some point?

Well, that's one way to look at it. Another way to look at it, is that when "all of Linux" went with systemd, there'd be little real interest and help upstream in various packages to port to "linux-without-systemd" - but as long as open Solaris (by any name), free-, net- and openbsd exist - there's likely to be some help with porting to a world without systemd.

Re: Devuan Jessie 1.0.0 stable release candidate

#30

Post by lomnakkus »

petre wrote: post #21
ZenoArrow wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"others have mentioned that it is a sysadmin's nightmare" Any examples? If anything I'd expect systemd to make things easier for sysadmins, would be interested in finding out what challenges sysadmins face because of systemd.

For instance apache not restarting properly on openSuSE 13.2 when ServerName doesn't resolve properly for some reason.

Haven't heard of this particular issue, but my main point is that the reaction should then be: "Ok, so let's fix that in systemd, upstream systemd .service files or whatever, and it gets fixed for everybody all at once.". The reaction should not be "systemd sucks!".

That is the real value of standardization.

EDIT: As far as I can tell as an outsider systemd is at least engineered well enough that these things can be solved, eventually. That wasn't the case before: Everybody had their own quarter-assed solutions that only worked for their specific case and would fail horribly in other cases, etc. etc.

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