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Systemd-free Devuan announces its first stable release candidate 'Jessie' 1.0.0

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Re: Systemd-free Devuan announces its first stable release candidate 'Jessie' 1.0.0

#11
post #3

Actual announcement: https://devuan.org/os/debian-fork/stable-candidate-announce-... Reminds me of dragonfly bsd. Anyone still use that? I stayed on 4.x until 6.x came out and later Scott Long actually admitted that 5.x was a bad release. So Devuan now wants to continue Debian with tons of shell scripts to maintain while most other major distros move to systemd. That means package maintainers are moving to systemd. S…

"I mean who in their right mind would write a 27 line init script when they could write a 7 line systemd unit?"

27 lines is horribly optimistic. Complex services like Apache, MySQL, etc. could have initscripts hundreds of lines long, plus the library of support scripts that most distros ship to make the initscripts shorter and more manageable. Most initscripts are like 50%, or more, boilerplate that's the same across all services, but, it's still a pain in the ass to maintain them.

I will not miss initscripts, even if I might have some occasional complaints about systemd.

Re: Systemd-free Devuan announces its first stable release candidate 'Jessie' 1.0.0

#12
post #3

Actual announcement: https://devuan.org/os/debian-fork/stable-candidate-announce-... Reminds me of dragonfly bsd. Anyone still use that? I stayed on 4.x until 6.x came out and later Scott Long actually admitted that 5.x was a bad release. So Devuan now wants to continue Debian with tons of shell scripts to maintain while most other major distros move to systemd. That means package maintainers are moving to systemd. S…

I mean who in their right mind would write a 27 line init script when they could write a 7 line systemd unit?

That is a gross and asinine misrepresentation of the impact of systemd.

Re: Systemd-free Devuan announces its first stable release candidate 'Jessie' 1.0.0

#14
post #8

Systemd has cool things, but it is a monster. I'm glad this alternative exists.

Are you going to use it? Just curious.

I've been using Void Linux for a couple of weeks now on my new machine at work and I've been enjoying it a lot. It brings a BSD'ish elegance to Linux.

No issues hardware-wise either so far:

- Intel Core i7-7700K

- MSI Z270 Gaming Pro Carbon

- Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1060 WINDFORCE OC 6G

- Samsung 960 EVO 1TB (M.2, NVME)

Re: Systemd-free Devuan announces its first stable release candidate 'Jessie' 1.0.0

#15
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you going to use it? Just curious.

I've been using Void Linux for a couple of weeks now on my new machine at work and I've been enjoying it a lot. It brings a BSD'ish elegance to Linux. No issues hardware-wise either so far: - Intel Core i7-7700K - MSI Z270 Gaming Pro Carbon - Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1060 WINDFORCE OC 6G - Samsung 960 EVO 1TB (M.2, NVME)

Did you expect hardware issues? AFAIK that's all handled by the kernel.

Re: Systemd-free Devuan announces its first stable release candidate 'Jessie' 1.0.0

#16
post #8

Systemd has cool things, but it is a monster. I'm glad this alternative exists.

Are you going to use it? Just curious.

Have been using it for more than a year... Excluding the absence of systemd it's an exact copy of Debian.

The single issue I have had so far, is that backports weren't marked as non-automatic: easily solved with a manual pin-priority rule.

I mailed them about it, so it could be solved now.

Re: Systemd-free Devuan announces its first stable release candidate 'Jessie' 1.0.0

#17
post #3

Actual announcement: https://devuan.org/os/debian-fork/stable-candidate-announce-... Reminds me of dragonfly bsd. Anyone still use that? I stayed on 4.x until 6.x came out and later Scott Long actually admitted that 5.x was a bad release. So Devuan now wants to continue Debian with tons of shell scripts to maintain while most other major distros move to systemd. That means package maintainers are moving to systemd. S…

> I mean who in their right mind would write a 27 line init script when they could write a 7 line systemd unit?

The person who already knows the one tool, but not the other, I suppose. Or who finds it easier to read a shell script than a new DSL.

Re: Systemd-free Devuan announces its first stable release candidate 'Jessie' 1.0.0

#18
post #3

Actual announcement: https://devuan.org/os/debian-fork/stable-candidate-announce-... Reminds me of dragonfly bsd. Anyone still use that? I stayed on 4.x until 6.x came out and later Scott Long actually admitted that 5.x was a bad release. So Devuan now wants to continue Debian with tons of shell scripts to maintain while most other major distros move to systemd. That means package maintainers are moving to systemd. S…

"I mean who in their right mind would write a 27 line init script when they could write a 7 line systemd unit?" 27 lines is horribly optimistic. Complex services like Apache, MySQL, etc. could have initscripts hundreds of lines long, plus the library of support scripts that most distros ship to make the initscripts shorter and more manageable. Most initscripts are like 50%, or more, boilerplate that's the same across…

As I pointed out at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14169188 , there's a discussion of MySQL on the systemd-devel mailing list right now. Clearly some people in that discussion are not familiar with MySQL. Clearly some of the people in this discussion are not familiar with MySQL either.

To help combat this ignorance, here are some actual systemd units:

* https://github.com/MariaDB/server/blob/10.1/support-files/ma... -- MariaDB's official systemd service unit, 173 lines long

* https://github.com/mysql/mysql-server/blob/5.7/scripts/syste... -- MySQL's official systemd service unit, 60 lines long

* https://github.com/percona/percona-server/blob/5.7/scripts/s... -- Percona's official systemd service unit, 61 lines long

* https://sources.debian.net/src/apache2/2.4.25-3/debian/apach... -- Debian's third party systemd service unit for Apache2, 15 lines long

So these figures that people are pulling out of thin air are erroneous by anywhere from half the actual length to an order of magnitude too small. And, ironically, the Apache systemd service unit is using a System 5 rc shell script under the covers to do all of the work. The apachectl program is in fact a System 5 rc script from 1997, complete with start/stop/restart/status verbs.

Re: Systemd-free Devuan announces its first stable release candidate 'Jessie' 1.0.0

#19
I'm glad the project exists and I hope it's stable enough to be adopted by companies in the future - my fear is that debian/rhel are entrenched now though.

Sidenote- So far this is not necessary, debian still has pluggable init systems as long as you don't add something which hard depends on systemd (like gnome)

I have done this one 5 of my own servers used for various things (including virtualhost/docker host) and it hasn't been an issue for over a year now.

http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/How_to_remove_syst...

Re: Systemd-free Devuan announces its first stable release candidate 'Jessie' 1.0.0

#20
post #19

I'm glad the project exists and I hope it's stable enough to be adopted by companies in the future - my fear is that debian/rhel are entrenched now though. Sidenote- So far this is not necessary, debian still has pluggable init systems as long as you don't add something which hard depends on systemd (like gnome) I have done this one 5 of my own servers used for various things (including virtualhost/docker host) and i…

> I'm glad the project exists and I hope it's stable enough to be adopted by companies in the future - my fear is that debian/rhel are entrenched now though.

It's not just debian/ubuntu/rhel, almost everyone has moved to systemd, even Arch Linux and Gentoo. As much as I agree with the ideas behind Devuan, knowing and understanding all the intricacies of systemd is now required knowledge for anyone doing Linux-based software development or devops. After putting it off for a while, I've moved on and have learned systemd. It's not the way I would have liked for the Linux ecosystem to have moved (I thought upstart was a decent base to build on), but I'm clearly in the minority here.

What's bothering most at this point are the binary log formats. But that changes from week to week. But it's here to stay, so I'm getting used to it.

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