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Why systemd is winning the init wars and other things aren't

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41–50 of 158 posts

Re: Why systemd is winning the init wars and other things aren't

#41
post #35

What about openrc? https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Comparison_of_init_systems What's up with the words words words

According to one of the links in the original article, OpenRC and sticking with SysVinit were also evaluated as options early in the discussions.

I'm sorry could you post a link?

I just really don't like how this stuff is couched in words from either an apt/yum dudes blog that focuses on boot time.

Re: Why systemd is winning the init wars and other things aren't

#42
post #14
post #7

"none of these alternate init systems did the hard work to actually become a replacement init system for anything much" And yet again, the anti-init-choice people show how they still don't understand the argument many of us have against the systemd change. This accusation presupposes that a change was necessary or desired in the first place. Sorry, no, some of these things should not be tied together. Without that ty…

> Why do the anti-choice people refuse to recognize that other people might have different requirements. Go build your own LFS systems if you want ultimate choice. You don't get to force upstream authors (who like systemd) and distribution developers (who like systemd) to do what you want. > I'm sticking with what already works. sysvinit works only if you combine incredibly low expectations with a bad case of Stockho…

[deleted]

Re: Why systemd is winning the init wars and other things aren't

#43
post #39
post #7

"none of these alternate init systems did the hard work to actually become a replacement init system for anything much" And yet again, the anti-init-choice people show how they still don't understand the argument many of us have against the systemd change. This accusation presupposes that a change was necessary or desired in the first place. Sorry, no, some of these things should not be tied together. Without that ty…

> This accusation presupposes that a change was necessary or desired in the first place. Sorry, no, some of these things should not be tied together. Without that tying, we already have (known, tested) tools that cover most of these features. This is the argument we've heard over and over again. The problem with traditional unix init scripts, together with cron, acpid, inetd, etc is that you need a big brittle mess o…

You're forgetting the traction that OpenRC has gained in the past year, they have already implemented cgroup support and experimental process tracking and it's moving beyond simple shell scripts.

It doesn't have feature parity with systemd, but it has portability and it's more permissively licensed, and factoring the speed of development I anticipate that it has a bright future ahead of it.

Re: Why systemd is winning the init wars and other things aren't

#44
post #40

Have you actually looked at what systemd does? Here's a handy chart curtesy of wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Systemd_components.svg That just seems insane to me, what do I know... (admittedly not much about init systems) Still, systemd tries to do everything under the sun, it just doesn't seem like an init system, it seems systemd basically wants to be an operating system and assume all responsibilitie…

> That just seems insane to me, what do I know... (admittedly not much about init systems)

> Still, systemd tries to do everything under the sun, it just doesn't seem like an init system, it seems systemd basically wants to be an operating system and assume all responsibilities as such.

Traditionally the things that systemd does were either done by a huge mess of shell scripts or were not done at all. There's no shortage of people who insist on doing things the way they were done before but to me, systemd makes a lot of sense.

It's true that it combines things that were previously done by cron, acpid, getty, pam, etc to deal with power management, network connectivity and login, etc. But I still find it a better alternative than having a lot of distribution specific shell scripts gluing all those individual services together. Besides booting faster, there are advantages like better fault tolerance and consistency.

Re: Why systemd is winning the init wars and other things aren't

#45
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to one of the links in the original article, OpenRC and sticking with SysVinit were also evaluated as options early in the discussions.

I'm sorry could you post a link? I just really don't like how this stuff is couched in words from either an apt/yum dudes blog that focuses on boot time.

No, I can't post a link. That phornoix article only links to other phoronix articles and I can't find a way to an actual discussion thread or meeting minutes from people that were actually involved and I don't have time to search for one.

Re: Why systemd is winning the init wars and other things aren't

#46
post #39
post #7

"none of these alternate init systems did the hard work to actually become a replacement init system for anything much" And yet again, the anti-init-choice people show how they still don't understand the argument many of us have against the systemd change. This accusation presupposes that a change was necessary or desired in the first place. Sorry, no, some of these things should not be tied together. Without that ty…

> This accusation presupposes that a change was necessary or desired in the first place. Sorry, no, some of these things should not be tied together. Without that tying, we already have (known, tested) tools that cover most of these features. This is the argument we've heard over and over again. The problem with traditional unix init scripts, together with cron, acpid, inetd, etc is that you need a big brittle mess o…

Not to devalue systemd, but I suspect that a lot of Unix problems could be solved if Unix offered a better general-purpose solution for gluing things together other than "big brittle masses of shell scripts". In particular, shell itself is an ugly mess of weird syntax, gotchas, and corner cases.

Re: Why systemd is winning the init wars and other things aren't

#47
post #32
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do the anti-choice people refuse to recognize that other people might have different requirements. Go build your own LFS systems if you want ultimate choice. You don't get to force upstream authors (who like systemd) and distribution developers (who like systemd) to do what you want. > I'm sticking with what already works. sysvinit works only if you combine incredibly low expectations with a bad case of Stockho…

But you get to force upstream authors and distribution developers who would like to be able to use something else? Sure. That is not a real argument on the merits of permitting this choice. It is just saying "nyah nyah I have the power and you do not."

Where did he indicate he wanted to force anyone?

Upstream authors are free to use whatever they like. It may impact which distributions wants to include their applications the more repackaging the distribution needs to do to include it, as a resource availability issue, but that's it.

Distribution developers already often substantially rework or write init scripts from scratch anyway, and that is exactly one of the reasons systemd is attractive:

It drastically cuts down the scripting boilerplate that otherwise has to be done or adapted to their distro for huge numbers of packages. It also contains most of the distro specific stuff outside of init.d, opening the door for lots more reuse.

But if you're an upstream developer and wants to ship sys-v init scripts, nobody has the power to stop you. Downstream will either simply write a systemd init file, or you might choose to add one if you like, or if you put LSB comments in your sys-v init file downstream might opt to use that with Systemd if they want to.

How exactly is upstream being forced to do anything?

How exactly are distribution developers being forced? If they are against their distributions decision, then they have the choice to package something else anyway and either ship it separately or fork the distro.

Re: Why systemd is winning the init wars and other things aren't

#48
post #44
post #40

Have you actually looked at what systemd does? Here's a handy chart curtesy of wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Systemd_components.svg That just seems insane to me, what do I know... (admittedly not much about init systems) Still, systemd tries to do everything under the sun, it just doesn't seem like an init system, it seems systemd basically wants to be an operating system and assume all responsibilitie…

> That just seems insane to me, what do I know... (admittedly not much about init systems) > Still, systemd tries to do everything under the sun, it just doesn't seem like an init system, it seems systemd basically wants to be an operating system and assume all responsibilities as such. Traditionally the things that systemd does were either done by a huge mess of shell scripts or were not done at all. There's no shor…

All those components that systemd manages, that's easily, I don't know how many millions of lines of code, and it all runs as pid 1, which, when it crashes, takes the whole system with it.

Just doesn't seem terribly smart.

Re: Why systemd is winning the init wars and other things aren't

#49
post #39
post #7

"none of these alternate init systems did the hard work to actually become a replacement init system for anything much" And yet again, the anti-init-choice people show how they still don't understand the argument many of us have against the systemd change. This accusation presupposes that a change was necessary or desired in the first place. Sorry, no, some of these things should not be tied together. Without that ty…

> This accusation presupposes that a change was necessary or desired in the first place. Sorry, no, some of these things should not be tied together. Without that tying, we already have (known, tested) tools that cover most of these features. This is the argument we've heard over and over again. The problem with traditional unix init scripts, together with cron, acpid, inetd, etc is that you need a big brittle mess o…

"While the traditional approach may work alright for a static setup like a server that is booted once and stays on forever, it's not good enough for a desktop, laptop or mobile device."

Sorry for sounding like a troll, but what you're saying is that the traditional approach works alright for setups where unix is actually good, and doesn't for setups where unix is actually crap.

Lets exclude mobile devices from this picture (because those don't use general purpose Linux distributions and arguably don't use unix at all, but a unix-kernel with specialized - non-unix - userspace) and concentrate on servers and desktops/laptops...

This systemd rage shows exactly why it's 2014 and while Linux is extensively used and trusted on the server side, it continues to limp along on peoples' desktops: it constantly reinvents the wheel (badly) with monolithic pieces of bloatware that are usually throw away tried-and-true solutions for unproven experiments. It throws away the old way of doing one thing and do it well in favor of components that do too much and become so complex that troubleshooting is a nightmare, exactly the kind of complaints we have about non-unix systems...

Need an example? Where are the people that used to criticize the Windows registry now? I just recently almost(1) had to throw away my entire home dir on Ubuntu just to try and reset Kontact, because in this day and age the configuration structure of this stuff is far worse, and it's almost impossible to separate one component's configuration files and folders from everything else. And I'm not even going to start ranting about how in the name of $DEITY a mail/calendar application needs MySQL running in the background and about there is not a single decent mail client for Linux right now. Mail... a decades-old problem!

I don't object to systemd itself, but I do object to systemd invading my servers that work just fine without it.

(1) "Almost" because I just learned to live with the occasional crashes and misbehavior caused by some pieces of old configuration still lingering somewhere.

Re: Why systemd is winning the init wars and other things aren't

#50
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This accusation presupposes that a change was necessary or desired in the first place. Sorry, no, some of these things should not be tied together. Without that tying, we already have (known, tested) tools that cover most of these features. This is the argument we've heard over and over again. The problem with traditional unix init scripts, together with cron, acpid, inetd, etc is that you need a big brittle mess o…

Not to devalue systemd, but I suspect that a lot of Unix problems could be solved if Unix offered a better general-purpose solution for gluing things together other than "big brittle masses of shell scripts". In particular, shell itself is an ugly mess of weird syntax, gotchas, and corner cases.

Granted, init-related scripts have become complex along the years, but we may argue that happened because of the same type of reasoning that's now justifying the move to systemd: the need to do everything in one place and automagically.

You know, even if I would agree with you that "shell itself is an ugly mess of weird syntax, gotchas, and corner cases" that doesn't preclude init scripts from being redone in something other than shell.

"People who don't understand unix are bound to reinvent it, badly."

This has become the tag line for Linux, and unfortunately is starting to reach the previously sacred grounds of basic (server) infrastructure.

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