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Systemd: The Biggest Myths

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Re: Systemd: The Biggest Myths

#2

Post by mhurron »

> systemd being Linux-only is not nice to the BSDs.

>Completely wrong. The BSD folks are pretty much uninterested in systemd. If systemd was portable, this would change nothing, they still wouldn't adopt it

systemd is not portable, it wasn't made to be portable, it relies on far too many linuxisms. Therefore the BSD's don't care about it. It is not 'the BSD's don't care about it so we didn't make it portable.'

Re: Systemd: The Biggest Myths

#4

Post by betterunix »

Will they have the same attitude as the ConsoleKit/PolicyKit/_Kit people have when someone says, "I need to do something different, but this service is preventing me from doing it?" As an example, I want to set up my system so that one user can play audio even when a different user is "active," yet after hours reading through bug reports about that and mailing list archives, all I could find where these responses:

* "Not our fault, it's that other service."

* "We are never going to support that. You don't want it anyway."

* "Well that will be fixed with systemd"

* "You can add the user to the audio group, but that's wrong and you should not do it. You should instead do that thing that the other guys are telling you not to do and that they will never support."

* "This will be fixed with systemd!"

So, I guess now the question is, when someone comes along and says, "I need to do X, I used to be able to do X before systemd was in use and now systemd is stopping me, how can I fixed that?" will systemd maintainers respond with things like the above? Will there be useful and thorough documentation, so that users can fix things without having to bug the maintainers?

Re: Systemd: The Biggest Myths

#7

Post by mseepgood »

mhurron wrote: post #2

> systemd being Linux-only is not nice to the BSDs. >Completely wrong. The BSD folks are pretty much uninterested in systemd. If systemd was portable, this would change nothing, they still wouldn't adopt it systemd is not portable, it wasn't made to be portable, it relies on far too many linuxisms. Therefore the BSD's don't care about it. It is not 'the BSD's don't care about it so we didn't make it portable.'

They would never use a new GPL licensed project for their core OS.

Re: Systemd: The Biggest Myths

#9

Post by zdw »

Given the title, I'll allow that most of these points are defensive and brusque. Unfortunately, this tends to be par for the course for the developer, and I think that turns people off.

Fundamentally, systemd tried solving too many problems at once, in a ways that inadvertently annoyed people. It replaced so much of the core infrastructure that upgrading systems resulted in an admin experience that feels alien. Giving people new tools to deal with things like binary logging != instantly changing every admin's CLI muscle memory.

I'm not saying that systemd doesn't solve valid problems (the issues it addresses are truly quite important) - it just goes about it in a dramatically jarring way.

Re: Systemd: The Biggest Myths

#10

Post by betterunix »

chris_wot wrote: post #5
cout wrote: post #3

I don't want systemd because I don't trust Lennart Poettering to be able to write reliable code.

Why the heck do people whale on him so much?

Well, consider his response here:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=461546

First, he denies that this is something people need. Then, when he is told that people need it, he says that they are just doing things the wrong way. Then, when people point out that this is neither unusual nor the wrong thing to want to do, he just repeats that this is not what was intended so too bad. He offers no advice on how to do things the right way despite being the only person who seems to think that everyone else is wrong.

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