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Shall we fork Debian?

debianfork.org

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Re: Shall we fork Debian?

#121

Post by johnbellone »

dijit wrote: post #110
0x006A wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious, have you ever used systemd and ran into a problem where your service file screwed up and you had yo read systemd's source code or are you making this up?

xl2tpd, still doesn't work. I actually had to try to figure out why, turns out systemd supercedes lsmod/modprobe etc; causing those programs to return 1 when invoked, there's no debug or anything so I was seriously weirded out. took me some time to figure out it was systemd. the firewall wrapper for iptables gives you an insecure default config and is hard to fix via config management "add a service that means port 3…

> My config management system creates files and pushes them out, I'm not in the habit of running idempotent commands repeatedly.. I'd rather check if something is correct before correcting it.

You should be laying down a base initial configuration at the time that the machine was provisioned. The basic example of this is the sudoers file. The default setup for Ubuntu/RHEL is different enough that it was causing problems and the solution was simple - force defaults.

Re: Shall we fork Debian?

#122

Post by mercurial »

csirac2 wrote: post #51
buster wrote: post #28

Or just shut up and put your efforts into maintaining https://packages.debian.org/jessie/systemd-shim Also, critique starts with "We like controlling the startup of the system with shell scripts that are readable".. How on earth is a systemd service file less readable then a hundreds of lines bash script? Also relevant: http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/open-source/65684-deb...

I dare you to tell my why lxc-docker silently fails to start at boot in jessie. Without a single shred of clue in any log, no matter what logging options are turned up - at least with a shell script I can add some echo/exit/touch etc. statements to convince myself it's at least being noticed at startup: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/docker-user/bg5-hlmR...

> I dare you to tell my why lxc-docker silently fails to start at boot in jessie. Without a single shred of clue in any log, no matter what logging options are turned up - at least with a shell script I can add some echo/exit/touch etc. statements to convince myself it's at least being noticed at startup: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/docker-user/bg5-hlmR....

Have you tried adding "touch" commands in ExecStartPre/ExecStartPost? Systemd also gives you a hint of why something didn't start via "systemctl status $servicename".

Re: Shall we fork Debian?

#123

Post by monochr »

andor wrote: post #114
monochr wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a developer and being an admin are completely different jobs. A admin needs to know a dozen languages and codes in bash most of the time, they have a hand written folder with glued in scraps next to their terminal which explains why they did what, how and why. This folder has entries like "reboot three times, do an rain dance and run godHelpYou.bash as root" because that's the only way that you've found out how…

For people like this "do one thing and do it well" is the only way that you can beat the impossible complexity of a modern machine back into a running computer even some of the time. When you have a single point of failure which is a black box you're just back to windows land: restart the service, reboot the computer, reinstall the system. For the developers, on the other hand, it might mean that some use case that i…

Different people have different definitions of complexity. For me having a single point of failure is complexity, for most people a centralized single process handling as much as possible is simplicity. Neither is right or wrong.

Re: Shall we fork Debian?

#124

Post by zorked »

Can we as a community move on from this? If someone feels like forking a distro "because systemd", let them, and it's only newsworthy if it's successful.

We could also move on from the accusations of "betraying the Unix philosophy". You know what else is the Unix philosophy? User-based security model. Fixed-length strings without overflow checks. World-readable passwords, badly hashed. Unencrypted remote shell with host-based trust. Maybe systemd is good, maybe systemd is bad, but accusing it of merely changing things is not a valid argument.

Re: Shall we fork Debian?

#126

Post by jws »

ancarda wrote: post #117

Am I the only person who prefers systemd? Maybe because it's the only init system I've managed to get my head around. Other init systems seem so complicated. A config file vs a bash script is far easier and they all seem to require forking. I only use Linux for servers so I may be unaware of a sane init system that works like systemd but isn't systemd. Until something like that appears, I'll stick to systemd.

I use systemd on all my servers. A couple of lines of declarative configure file to specify a daemon with its restart policy beats a messy shell script.

For my custom processes I've ripped out all the chroot, fork, and setuid code added in a couple lines for systemd watchdog and status support calls. I'm not going back.

Granted, journalctl with a filter is longer to type than cat. Someday I'll add nice alias to my shell rc.

Re: Shall we fork Debian?

#127

Post by cuillevel3 »

Yes, more lazy admins. Lifelong learning anyone? They can't vote because they've been using Debian for free all this time. Oh, the entitlement.

Go ahead fork it.

I'm confident systemd will modernize Linux servers and desktops alike. And if by next year there is something better, systemd will be replaced.

Just take a look at device filessystems. Anyone remember devfsd? Let me cite wikipedia:

"While devfs was a step forward, it had several disadvantages of its own.[2] Since Linux version 2.5 devfs has been succeeded by udev."

Re: Shall we fork Debian?

#128

Post by asdfaoeu »

dredmorbius wrote: post #102
keithpeter wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fork would also mean that Debian (systemd edition) would not have to keep legacy init script support. You could have a 'clean' systemd in around Jessie+1 I imagine.

Debian already supports non-Linux kernels on which systemd won't function. So the legacy init support (or a compatible alternative) will still be required.

It remains to be seen if the kFreeBSD ports will part of the official release https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2014/09/msg00... .

Re: Shall we fork Debian?

#129

Post by grifferz »

captainmuon wrote: post #21
qznc wrote: post #5

How does forking Debian solve anything? The issue is that Gnome, KDE, and other software requires systemd. You need to fix/maintain their compatibility with other init systems. Then it is easy for Debian user to switch init systems.

> The issue is that Gnome, KDE, and other software requires systemd. This I can't wrap my head around, why does Gnome for example need systemd? There are standard ways on GNU/Linux to do everything it needs in a unix fashion (by deferring to small specialized tools): shutdown reboot whoami uname mount ... These and similar tools (or libc functions) give you all information you need (username, etc.) and system functio…

This I can't wrap my head around, why does Gnome for example need systemd?

Here's a good summary of the issue: http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/de...

A bad thing about systemd and where we are now is the ever-changing API that is mentioned, which hampers alternatives to systemd.

But, that is where we are now, Debian isn't in much of a position to change that, and forking probably isn't going to help with that. Debian wasn't ignorant of that either; these issues were discussed at length in the tech committee debate that originally settled on systemd being the default for jessie.

Re: Shall we fork Debian?

#130

Post by phkamp »

cuillevel3 wrote: post #127

Yes, more lazy admins. Lifelong learning anyone? They can't vote because they've been using Debian for free all this time. Oh, the entitlement. Go ahead fork it. I'm confident systemd will modernize Linux servers and desktops alike. And if by next year there is something better, systemd will be replaced. Just take a look at device filessystems. Anyone remember devfsd? Let me cite wikipedia: "While devfs was a step fo…

The way Linux did DEVFS was so utter moronic that it's no surprise it was strangled in the crib.

Unfortunately people seem to have confused "this DEVFS implementation" with "The idea of DEVFS" and thrown the baby out with the bathwater.

For comparison FreeBSD has had DEVFS for 14 years and had a prototype for a good number of years before that.

And yes, I wrote that DEVFS for FreeBSD :-)

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