Systemd-free Devuan announces its first stable release candidate 'Jessie' 1.0.0 • Hacker News Board

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

#21

Post by slau » Sat, Apr 22, 2017, 11:10 PM UTC

aerique wrote: post #14

lomnakkus wrote: post #9

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)

I've been a Void user for a year and some months now. It's a great system. Xbps (the package manager) is so ridiculously fast, it puts zypper, apt and dnf to shame.

The base system is extremely light and nimble. Getting FDE up and running was a breeze, even with the fairly barebones installer, and it being a rolling release makes it very nice as well. It's maybe a bit too bleeding edge to run on servers, but as a workstation distribution, I can't fault it.

Disclaimer: I'm donating monthly to the project, and am currently trying to contribute a few servers to the build farm, so I'm probably very biased.

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

#22

Post by reddytowns » Sat, Apr 22, 2017, 11:16 PM UTC

jnbiche wrote: post #20

dijit wrote: 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 s…

While Gentoo supports systemd, by default it will still use init scripts.

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

#23

Post by dane-pgp » Sat, Apr 22, 2017, 11:17 PM UTC

lomnakkus wrote: post #10

tgragnato wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> https://git.devuan.org/devuan/devuan-project/wikis/devuan-co... They call Jessie a "Matching release", I guess the intention is to stress the fact that you can safely migrate from Debian without a reinstall.

They missed an opportunity there. Should have been "jessie-j". ... but I actually agree with duskwuff. It's hugely confusing and possibly even disingenuous to call it "jessie".

Devuan "jessie" is designed to match Debian "jessie" as much as possible, and is a one-off copying of the release name in order to mark the branching point in the histories of the two distros as they diverge slightly over time.

As the release announcement says:

"Devuan is the Debian that was and could have been. Our goal is to provide a viable and sustainable alternative. It is a new path, nurtured with your help and support."

so Devuan could be considered the true inheritor of the "jessie" name, and of the name "Debian", for that matter, although keeping that would obviously be too confusing.

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

#24

Post by mxvzr » Sat, Apr 22, 2017, 11:21 PM UTC

jnbiche wrote: post #20

dijit wrote: 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 s…

While you can find stage3 tarballs for systemd, OpenRC is still the default for Gentoo AFAIK. (And speaking of Arch Linux, I can't really say I miss initscripts)

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

#25

Post by SwellJoe » Sun, Apr 23, 2017, 12:04 AM UTC

JdeBP wrote: post #18

SwellJoe wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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/…

Yeah, legacy code is hard, sometimes, and sometimes complexity can't be hidden entirely.

The initscripts for MySQL/MariaDB are still orders of magnitude larger than these (unusually large) systemd unit files. Managing complexity is hard. SystemD helps. More modern service design, and simpler services, helps (compare/contrast Apache startup vs nginx or caddy, or MySQL vs MongoDB; sure, the newer options do less, but they do "enough" for some use cases).

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

#26

Post by peterwwillis » Sun, Apr 23, 2017, 12:17 AM UTC

SwellJoe wrote: post #11

INTPenis wrote: 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…

You don't maintain an init script. You write it once. It doesn't do anything but run a program with an argument. There is no need to modify it except once every few years if your system or your application changes significantly in how it is started or stopped.

On Slack, the init scripts range from 6 lines (rc.font) to 445 lines (rc.S). Mean: 105, Median: 64, Mode: 56, 36, 48. BSD probably has even less complicated init scripts.

Your system might have more complicated init scripts, but it doesn't need them to be complicated. I suggest you direct your ire at your distribution, not init. (Most distributions totally misuse init and try to make it do things it was not intended for)

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

#27

Post by dijit » Sun, Apr 23, 2017, 12:19 AM UTC

jnbiche wrote: post #20

dijit wrote: 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 s…

I have a standing policy regarding systemd.

It's fine for my desktop and laptop, it's not fine for my server.

My servers (generally speaking) do one thing and that thing absolutely can't be mucked with, systemd does a lot of what I would consider mucking.. binary complexity and weird integration I seriously dislike.

But it's actually beneficial on a desktop system.

My friends who have learned systemd are basically the same as you- "Eh, it's alright when it works.. and it's where everyone has gone so I guess I'll live with it"

I take exception to that statement entirely, this is open source, the land where you can replace your kernel with a BSD one and continue trucking with GNU ultilities as if nothing happened basically- why do we have to go backwards in usability for someones ego.

(and it's hard for me not to see it as one mans ego given his repeated hostility and arrogance regarding how other people use computers professionally)

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

#28

Post by vacri » Sun, Apr 23, 2017, 12:24 AM UTC

JdeBP wrote: post #18

SwellJoe wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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/…

Counting empty lines and comments is hardly the way to make your point. The mariadb unit file you linked to is only 34 actual lines, the mysql unit file only 22, percona 23.

And if you're writing your own unit files rather than ones for public consumption, you probably won't include lines like "Documentation=" and some other minor args.

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

#29

Post by peterwwillis » Sun, Apr 23, 2017, 12:25 AM UTC

INTPenis wrote: 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 would actually be fine with using systemd to manage a few services. Does it no longer require itself to be pid 1 to function?

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

#30

Post by vacri » Sun, Apr 23, 2017, 12:31 AM UTC

peterwwillis wrote: post #26

SwellJoe wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

You don't maintain an init script. You write it once. It doesn't do anything but run a program with an argument. There is no need to modify it except once every few years if your system or your application changes significantly in how it is started or stopped. On Slack, the init scripts range from 6 lines (rc.font) to 445 lines (rc.S). Mean: 105, Median: 64, Mode: 56, 36, 48. BSD probably has even less complicated in…

However, few sysv init scripts are the same structure. Each one is written by different people, who do things slightly different ways (and occasionally get things slightly wrong), and on different distros they use different tools. Debugging sysv init scripts is more complex than debugging a systemd unit file.

One example that neither camp does well is 'status'. Systemd is too verbose, but at least always the same standard output. Sysv init is whatever random noise the author decides to put out. Sometimes it's multiline. Sometimes it's no line, but an exit code. Sometimes it has colour. Sometimes it doesn't tell you whether it's running or not, but just outputs the service name. Sometimes you just have to be familiar enough with running the service such that you have what the status lines actually mean already in your head.

> It doesn't do anything but run a program with an argument.

It also needs to find that program again in order to provide status on it, stop it, and if the application has support, reload it. Very few init scripts are fire-and-forget startup scripts.