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

Why Did ArchLinux Embrace Systemd? (2016)

reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 132 posts

Re: Why Did ArchLinux Embrace Systemd? (2016)

#61

Post by bitwize »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #51
NotATroll wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just like PulseAudio does. I think part of it actually stems from people that had problems early on with PulseAudio, and have developed a vendetta against Poettering. Whether that vendetta is justified or not, I don't know. Personally systemd hasn't been a pain point. It's been far less of a headache than everyone at the office thought it would be.

Poettering used alloca() as a poor man's garbage collector. Proper manual memory management is just "too hard". Other lingering code quality issues surely remain when the primary author is taking these sort of shortcuts and not considering how to write robust C.

Nobody can write robust C. The correct answer is Poettering should've switched to Rust. With few exceptions, any code base that has not yet done so should be considered brittle and bug-prone.

Re: Why Did ArchLinux Embrace Systemd? (2016)

#62

Post by kayfox »

megous wrote: post #31
darkwater wrote: post #5

Looking back, I still don't get all the hatred that SystemD got (and sometimes is still getting). A part from some nice-to-have missing niche features (I'm looking at you, retries management with one-shots), it Just Works™ for the vast majority of use cases, just like PulseAudio does. The fact is that the minority which indeed have problems is very vocal because those problems come from complex corner-cases that only…

Until it doesn't. Until very recently having wrong permission on one of the networkd config files would result in networkd ignoring the rest of the perfectly readable network configuration files too, cutting off all network connectivity. (Systemd also requested the permission change iself.) Currently there's a bug where if you have a bridge and all interfaces are disconnected from the bridge (I use hot-pluggable USB…

I've also seen it either not bring up the firewall (load iptables rules) or suddenly decide to take it down (remove the rules).

I'm not sure why it did that, as I didn't have time to dig into the why while trying to deal with the result.

Re: Why Did ArchLinux Embrace Systemd? (2016)

#63

Post by otabdeveloper2 »

JohnFen wrote: post #44
darkwater wrote: post #5

Looking back, I still don't get all the hatred that SystemD got (and sometimes is still getting). A part from some nice-to-have missing niche features (I'm looking at you, retries management with one-shots), it Just Works™ for the vast majority of use cases, just like PulseAudio does. The fact is that the minority which indeed have problems is very vocal because those problems come from complex corner-cases that only…

> it Just Works™ for the vast majority of use cases, just like PulseAudio does. I am not in the vast majority of use cases, then, because systemd is a serious pain in my butt. But then, so is PulseAudio (which is why I make sure it's never installed). My issues with systemd (both technical and as an andicator of the direction Linux is going) are severe enough that I'm actively preparing to move all of my machines ove…

> I'm actively preparing to move all of my machines over to BSD

You remind me of all those people who are going to move to Canada "any day now" because of Trump.

Re: Why Did ArchLinux Embrace Systemd? (2016)

#65

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

bitwize wrote: post #61
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poettering used alloca() as a poor man's garbage collector. Proper manual memory management is just "too hard". Other lingering code quality issues surely remain when the primary author is taking these sort of shortcuts and not considering how to write robust C.

Nobody can write robust C. The correct answer is Poettering should've switched to Rust. With few exceptions, any code base that has not yet done so should be considered brittle and bug-prone.

The problem is the Java generaton that never learned how to do it.

Re: Why Did ArchLinux Embrace Systemd? (2016)

#66

Post by cwyers »

dijit wrote: post #45
Analemma_ wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is when "It just works" doesnt, it's an undebuggable, un-understandable, documentationless kluge with binary logs. Init scripts were undebuggable, un-understanable, documentationless kluge with text logs, and systemd has a perfectly functional format converter. I'm not seeing the regression here.

2 things; 1) Init scripts varied by implementation very much, I have managed to successfully debug, make, read and otherwise modify/parse init scripts from basically every _major_ distro including OpenBSD and FreeBSD. I am not particularly intelligent, so if I can do it, you can. 2) There is no reason to assume we go back to bash scripts per-se, there is a huge middle ground between a huge C program which execve()'s…

Re 2... there is a lot of middle ground there, but can that middle ground tackle all of the problems systemd is trying to solve without resorting to what they've resorted to?

Re: Why Did ArchLinux Embrace Systemd? (2016)

#67

Post by knolax »

darkwater wrote: post #5

Looking back, I still don't get all the hatred that SystemD got (and sometimes is still getting). A part from some nice-to-have missing niche features (I'm looking at you, retries management with one-shots), it Just Works™ for the vast majority of use cases, just like PulseAudio does. The fact is that the minority which indeed have problems is very vocal because those problems come from complex corner-cases that only…

> it Just Works™

Avoiding that kind of attitude is why I moved to Linux in the first place. Nothing ever "Just Works", most systems eventually break down, especially if you're doing anything non-popular. You can't just ignore things when they break, having an easy way to fix things is one of the most important parts of complex software. Saying "It Just Works" indicates to me that the developers don't care if the system is opaque and hard to work with, which has been my experience with systemd.

Re: Why Did ArchLinux Embrace Systemd? (2016)

#68

Post by zzzcpan »

adrian_b wrote: post #37
darkwater wrote: post #5

Looking back, I still don't get all the hatred that SystemD got (and sometimes is still getting). A part from some nice-to-have missing niche features (I'm looking at you, retries management with one-shots), it Just Works™ for the vast majority of use cases, just like PulseAudio does. The fact is that the minority which indeed have problems is very vocal because those problems come from complex corner-cases that only…

Before using SystemD for the first time, I also wondered if there is any grain of truth in what its opponents said about SystemD. However, after trying SystemD for one week, I became convinced that the designers of SystemD are incompetent, so they cannot be trusted with a component of such importance for a computer. I am normally a Gentoo user, but a few years ago I wanted to install Linux in a hurry on a small compu…

The more you have to deal with systemd, the more you hate it. I wrote maybe two dozens of unit files at this point and can't take seriously any praise of systemd anymore, I immediately assume such people don't actually do anything with it beyond starting and stopping services.

Re: Why Did ArchLinux Embrace Systemd? (2016)

#69

Post by peterwwillis »

darkwater wrote: post #5

Looking back, I still don't get all the hatred that SystemD got (and sometimes is still getting). A part from some nice-to-have missing niche features (I'm looking at you, retries management with one-shots), it Just Works™ for the vast majority of use cases, just like PulseAudio does. The fact is that the minority which indeed have problems is very vocal because those problems come from complex corner-cases that only…

The hatred has little to do with functionality.

Say you live in a city, and you have multiple options of transportation: walk, bike, scooter, tuk-tuk, bus. None of them are the most ideal, but you have variety, choices. They're all simple enough for anyone to learn how to use them quickly, and you can even hop from one to the other. But you think, I'd kind of like to be able to move around faster.

The city also isn't running perfectly. There are part-time job shortages, traffic jams, the education system is haphazardly put together. The city wants a way to solve its problems too.

Now say a consulting company comes in and convinces the city they should abandon the other options and adopt a new transit system. This system is fully automated, faster, cheaper. Not only that, but it also solves the job crisis, eliminates traffic jams, organizes the education system. Nobody who uses the transportation system will notice that they are using new transportation, because they're going to put out cardboard cutouts of the old transportation systems, so in theory, everyone should just be able to use it as-is. So the mayor, having heard the pitch, signs a contract: The company owns the city's transportation for life.

Only it's not as perfect as the consulting company claimed. Those cardboard transportation shims will move you around, but you can't choose your seat, you can't talk to anyone else, you have to use pre-approved payment methods and pre-approved routes. Sometimes your route will break down, and there's nobody on board to tell you what to do. Sometimes you get to the wrong destination, but you can't walk home anymore, so you have to just sit there until you figure it out. Sometimes it never shows up. You think, I just want to get around town; why is this so complicated?

You have no choice or control. You didn't vote for this, and you can't vote to change it. You could move to another city, but that is way too involved for most people, so they will hope for the best, deal with whatever pains there are, and learn how to navigate this new, more complex world, because somebody gave a good sales pitch to the mayor. And you think to yourself, "Didn't I move to this city to have more choices?"

Re: Why Did ArchLinux Embrace Systemd? (2016)

#70

Post by dijit »

cwyers wrote: post #66
dijit wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2 things; 1) Init scripts varied by implementation very much, I have managed to successfully debug, make, read and otherwise modify/parse init scripts from basically every _major_ distro including OpenBSD and FreeBSD. I am not particularly intelligent, so if I can do it, you can. 2) There is no reason to assume we go back to bash scripts per-se, there is a huge middle ground between a huge C program which execve()'s…

Re 2... there is a lot of middle ground there, but can that middle ground tackle all of the problems systemd is trying to solve without resorting to what they've resorted to?

From the original problem statement[0]? Yeah I think so, Runit solves all of those issues.

[0]: http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html

Post reply on HN