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Systemd, 10 years later (2020)

blog.darknedgy.net

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Re: Systemd, 10 years later (2020)

#81

Post by diegocg »

Spooky23 wrote: post #67
rlonn wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s buzzword bingo with the aim to inflate the writer’s ego and intimidate the reader. This stuff happens all the time when insecure people get to write things.

Exactly. “Idempotent” is one of the key words used as a cudgel in this way. It’s great for the bullshit artist, as to a layman the dictionary definition is completely inscrutable.

Idempotent is a perfectly fine word. There is absolutely no reason why CS shouldn't have it's own jargon. I found the description very descriptive.

Re: Systemd, 10 years later (2020)

#82

Post by Gigachad »

tarkin2 wrote: post #46

The hatred for Systemd seems to come from those who see the unix philosophy of small, single use programs being thrown away in favour of a monolith. Back when I had linux as a desktop (around the day of slackware 10) there were plenty of problems with simple stuff like mounting usbs, connecting to wifi etc--possible but a pain. I've hardly looked at systemd or linux in such a way for a long time, however.

Linux users tend to come up with whatever "philosophy" suits their agenda of complaining about all change. The unix philosophy gets thrown out the window as soon as it comes to Wayland which took a huge, bloated, and buggy Xorg and broke it down to something more sane and manageable.

Re: Systemd, 10 years later (2020)

#83

Post by SkyMarshal »

Spooky23 wrote: post #67
rlonn wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s buzzword bingo with the aim to inflate the writer’s ego and intimidate the reader. This stuff happens all the time when insecure people get to write things.

Exactly. “Idempotent” is one of the key words used as a cudgel in this way. It’s great for the bullshit artist, as to a layman the dictionary definition is completely inscrutable.

> as to a layman the dictionary definition is completely inscrutable.

This isn't written for laymen, who would obviously never be reading about what SystemD is. It's written for specialists who do engineering work on or with Linux, and who actually need to know the technical details of their tools.

And anyway, I suspect plenty of laymen, and highly trained professionals in other fields like law, medicine, and philosophy among others, would have no trouble understanding what "idempotent" is. It's not inscrutable at all, but rather is one of the easiest concepts in CS and software engineering to understand.

Re: Systemd, 10 years later (2020)

#84

Post by CogitoCogito »

Spooky23 wrote: post #67
rlonn wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s buzzword bingo with the aim to inflate the writer’s ego and intimidate the reader. This stuff happens all the time when insecure people get to write things.

Exactly. “Idempotent” is one of the key words used as a cudgel in this way. It’s great for the bullshit artist, as to a layman the dictionary definition is completely inscrutable.

> Exactly.

> “Idempotent” is one of the key words used as a cudgel in this way. It’s great for the bullshit artist, as to a layman the dictionary definition is completely inscrutable.

Are you saying that being "idempotent" is completely inscrutable? Is it not a fairly straight-forward concept?

Re: Systemd, 10 years later (2020)

#85

Post by [deleted] »

Spooky23 wrote: post #67
rlonn wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s buzzword bingo with the aim to inflate the writer’s ego and intimidate the reader. This stuff happens all the time when insecure people get to write things.

Exactly. “Idempotent” is one of the key words used as a cudgel in this way. It’s great for the bullshit artist, as to a layman the dictionary definition is completely inscrutable.

[deleted]

Re: Systemd, 10 years later (2020)

#86

Post by Sebb767 »

rlonn wrote: post #57
ratorx wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a fan of this description. It might not be the easiest to understand or the first one you should read, but I wish more things had this kind of description somewhere (but not necessarily on the introductory materials or front page).

It’s buzzword bingo with the aim to inflate the writer’s ego and intimidate the reader. This stuff happens all the time when insecure people get to write things.

I highly disagree. Sure, it contains a lot of buzzwords, but it clearly describes systemd and its philosophy in a single paragraph. It's not the first thing you should throw at someone unprepared (because then it would really be intimidation), but it prevents you from reading 20 pages of documentation and not getting the gist.

Sometimes, a concise, high-level overview is what you need.

Re: Systemd, 10 years later (2020)

#87

Post by throwaway984393 »

throwawayboise wrote: post #48
an_d_rew wrote: post #23

This was an amazing review, and love systemd or hate it, this article gives a fantastic history and exposition of what systemd actually is . My favorite quote (and when taken in context is much less tongue-in-cheek thank you might think): systemd is an event-driven object manager with dependency-like side effects which ‘boxes’ primitive kernel resources and userspace subsystems into a generic object type called Unit.…

It reads like an over-eager developer read Design Patterns and then was tasked with writing a new init system for Linux.

His name is Lennart Poettering, and apparently he was tasked with reinventing the entire operating system

Re: Systemd, 10 years later (2020)

#88

Post by eternityforest »

zozbot234 wrote: post #44
an_d_rew wrote: post #23

This was an amazing review, and love systemd or hate it, this article gives a fantastic history and exposition of what systemd actually is . My favorite quote (and when taken in context is much less tongue-in-cheek thank you might think): systemd is an event-driven object manager with dependency-like side effects which ‘boxes’ primitive kernel resources and userspace subsystems into a generic object type called Unit.…

...so, how does a systemd unit definition differ from a Makefile (other than using a different syntax, obviously)? What features would you need to add to UNIX make (and PID 1, for that matter) in order to be able to separate out this whole dependency management business from the other stuff PID 1 has to deal with already?

For one thing make is imperative and doesn't actually know what it's doing. Systemd is declarative. You'd need to replace all the options service files give you.

Make doesn't do dependencies between unrelated projects. A makefile can't say "I want to run if X runs, but I should run before them".

Make doesn't have supervision, you'd need some kind of declaratively configured poller.

Systemd is also parallel, there's probably some complexity there that make might or might not handle well.

I think the most important problems would only be obvious once you started using a replacement system though. Systemd almost totally replaces the need for any imperative code whatsoever for process autostart, configuration, and supervision, and that might be hard to do in a more modular setup.

You don't need extra stuff besides the service file. Everything is extremely consistent and done the same way for every service.

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