Shall we fork Debian? • Hacker News Board

Re: Shall we fork Debian?

#201

Post by yrro » Sun, Oct 19, 2014, 4:55 PM UTC

TheSwordsman wrote: post #37

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...

And if that service file screws up how do you troubleshoot it? You end up diving in to the source code of systemd, versus fixing a bug in your script. And don't get me started on binary log files. As was said before, buster, your attitude is the problem. It's the same as the systemd developers and those within the community. SysVInit has served me thus far with no issues.

> And if that service file screws up how do you troubleshoot it? You end up diving in to the source code of systemd, versus fixing a bug in your script.

Surely the systemd equivalent would be delving into the source code for dash, or god help you dash... I know which one I'd prefer--not that I've ever hard to do either, fortunately!

Re: Shall we fork Debian?

#202

Post by 23david » Sun, Oct 19, 2014, 4:55 PM UTC

LeonidasXIV wrote: post #189

m45t3r wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, this is true. The only thing I concluded from this page is "I am an old time Debian admin, I don't want to learn another way to configure my system that is not a bunch of shell scripts, so I am gonna bitch about this decision and create a fork". Actually, I find it's funny how anti-systemd people nowadays claim that "systemd is a init for desktop systems" since Gnome adopt something unrelated to the _init_ part…

Actually, systemd is pretty awesome for servers. I wrote a simple program that outputs to stdout and ran it under systemd. * it automatically cares about starting it * it automatically puts the programs stdout into the journal (from which I can filter the output of my specific program without having to syslog() everything) * it allows me to run the program as user with one line in the INI unit file * it allows to mak…

And if there is a situation where your program is acting wonky, what non-systemd command can you use from the shell prompt to debug and reproduce exactly what systemd is doing?

Re: Shall we fork Debian?

#203

Post by noselasd » Sun, Oct 19, 2014, 4:56 PM UTC

eloisant wrote: post #188

IgorPartola wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came here to say exactly that. "We don't have time to work with the Debian folks on a solution, but have time to create our own distro." Right. Then again, they should go for it. If nobody but them uses it, that's that. If it gains traction, cool. On another point: why the hell would you have a choice in init systems? As a user of the OS, I care that the proceses start, stop, and keep running. I don't care how. A p…

Because when you're a sysadmin, you often have to write init scripts for the software you have to run. Typically, you run servers for a company, the developers wrote a web application and the whole point of the server is to serve that app. You need init scripts to start, stop monitor this app. The choice of init system makes a big difference in your daily life.

* systemd init files are a lot easier to write and get right, and you get supervision for free

* you can continue to use sysv init scripts with systemd

Re: Shall we fork Debian?

#204

Post by XorNot » Sun, Oct 19, 2014, 4:56 PM UTC

e12e wrote: post #190

XorNot wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your log files are binary already. What do you think 'cat' is, other then a binary log reader? Binary log files are as easy to read as ASCII with the right translator. Tagged binary formats are easily and trivially self-describing, and as resistant to corruption as ASCII. The problem is, people think they'll be able to understand corrupt ASCII logs, but in reality basically never deal with them. They deal with trunca…

Good points. As for compression: I think most people compress logs post-rotation. So you'll be unlikely to have a corrupted compressed log. Either the file will be compressed, then then original removed, or compression will fail, and the original will remain untouched. It's more of an issue with whatever is written to disk by running processes. As you point out, it's debatable whether or not unicode/ascii vs "binary"…

Exactly my point: this isn't a complex database format. It's a tagged binary format, written in an append only fashion. So you're only going to lose data if the tool decides to write bad data, but that's just as true of a text log format - your logs are useless if all those numbers don't actually relate to the values they claim to.

So any tool which can read a journald journal can happily do so until it hits hard corruption - which is about as well as you ever do with syslog. I'll gladly trade an unlikely and really narrow recovery profile, for smaller, easily machine readable, well-defined log files (in the sense that, to write an entry, someone wrote down the exact struct somewhere, and had to keep using it that way. No regex's which fail in some case which happens once every 1 million lines of log file). Especially since the compatibility layer is just "forward text logs to syslog".

Reference: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/journal-fil...

Re: Shall we fork Debian?

#205

Post by Zancarius » Sun, Oct 19, 2014, 4:57 PM UTC

progman wrote: post #172

asdfaoeu wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the components mentioned are actually optional and you can build systemd without them or disable them at runtime. I'm guessing this idea that this idea that systemd is targeted for the desktop is from the logind kerfuffle with GNOME and friends but it's actually an optional component. If anything though systemd is more targeted towards server market.

Fine. There speaks nothing against Debian Desktop for servers by admins who prefer systemd. I am current happy Debian user myself, and I would use such a system for my desktop. However regarding servers I agree with the Unix veterans that Unix(-like) systems should be faithful to the KISS philosophy which made Unix so great. The IT world has become very complex, and we should not make it more complex than necessary.…

> However regarding servers I agree with the Unix veterans that Unix(-like) systems should be faithful to the KISS philosophy which made Unix so great.

Unit files are surprisingly powerful and simple and follow KISS quite well (they're easier to maintain). systemd is also not quite as monolithic as some are wont to believe.

> Debian and its derived distris took over the server world, and (AFAIK) it accomplished that with SystemV not with systemd. So SystemV is not that bad.

This just seems disingenuous. It's almost like arguing we didn't need nginx because the web server market was won by Apache, not nginx.

systemd has its warts, I won't deny that, but it seems that most of those opposed to it are opposed strictly on the merit that it's new and different.

Re: Shall we fork Debian?

#206

Post by LeonidasXIV » Sun, Oct 19, 2014, 5:02 PM UTC

enneff wrote: post #111

tinco wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it isn't.. being on a soap box doesn't give you some special permission to just spread false information without being interrupted. I heard this argument before, there was an article about book reviews, and that authors who interacted with reviewers (by writing on their own blogs about them or on twitter) would be labeled Bad Behaving Author and be shunned by the review community. What's up with that? If someone t…

> being on a soap box Let's get this straight: he's not on a soap box (a term that refers to people who shout at passers by on the street), but rather at a conference at which he was invited to speak. The audience came into the room to hear him give his talk. Lennart rudely interrupted this. > I heard this argument before, there was an article about book reviews, and that authors who interacted with reviewers (by wri…

> Let's get this straight: he's not on a soap box (a term that refers to people who shout at passers by on the street), but rather at a conference at which he was invited to speak. The audience came into the room to hear him give his talk. Lennart rudely interrupted this.

I was actually there and the talk was so much better for this. Also, I don't think the Chaos Communication Congress is that much like a business conference. It is hackers and people who care about software, not so much for proper manners.

If I remember correctly, Lennart specifically came to the congress because there were rumors before that this talk will be bashing Lennarts software, so it was no surprise to see him show up.

Re: Shall we fork Debian?

#207

Post by philsnow » Sun, Oct 19, 2014, 5:09 PM UTC

snogglethorpe wrote: post #13

martin_ wrote: post #4

From the article: We are excluded from voting on the issue: only few of us have the time and patience to interact with Debian on a voluntary basis. Using the same argument, forking would seem like a horrible idea if there isn't active maintainers.

The anti-systemd-brigade only seems to be a small minority of Debian devs (though they're very loud, and very persistent), so I'm not sure it would have much effect on the project as a whole. If a fork would reduce the time spent arguing about the init system (which 99% of users don't care about), it could even prove beneficial for Debian. [It seems unlikely the fork would attract the critical mass of devs/users to s…

> The anti-systemd-brigade only seems to be a small minority of Debian devs (though they're very loud, and very persistent)

The pro-systemd brigade only seems to be a small minority of Debian devs (though they're extremely loud, and trollishly persistent).

I've thought for a long time that they must have a place where they all hang out in secret and share links to discussions where they need a pro-systemd response / a handful of downvotes.

In this way they give the impression that their numbers are much larger (the reasoning here is that for any given post or discussion, if the number of "ambient" / "organic" critical comments or downvotes that it receives is a proxy for how critical the community at large is, so by sharing links they make it seem like there's a broad base of support for systemd).

This kind of thing seems to happen periodically, where a person / group of people railroads a decision using methods that are outside the "accepted" set of methods for OSS development, namely meritocratic discussions.

Who knows what their motivations are. It probably varies per person. Having "I designed and implemented a new init system and got all the major distributions to adopt it" on a resume is a huge demonstration of "impact", which is something that really pays off in a lot of companies / organizations.

"Impact" isn't always "progress", though.

Re: Shall we fork Debian?

#208

Post by bjourne » Sun, Oct 19, 2014, 5:13 PM UTC

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...

> 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?

Bash scripts? Unless I'm really mistaken, startup scripts need to be written towards the POSIX shell. It's kind of like bash scripts except you pretend the year is 1985 and no bash versions released after that exists.

Re: Shall we fork Debian?

#209

Post by perlpimp » Sun, Oct 19, 2014, 5:16 PM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #191

perlpimp wrote: post #139

I am not sure why debian needs to force replace sysvinit, can't they have systemd-debian distro that will have all the shiny stuff in it? and maybe have it grow and if it won't go down with their userbase then they can discontinue it? Everyone moving to systemd seems a bit fishy. C is very insecure for daemon coding with all other options why no use go for example? There might be some influence on behalf interested g…

I am not sure why debian needs to force replace sysvinit, can't they have systemd-debian distro that will have all the shiny stuff in it? and maybe have it grow and if it won't go down with their userbase then they can discontinue it? Go read the arguments, there are many reasons why they decided to switch. A big part of it is that Gnome/KDE and other upstream software is already dependent on systemd, so keeping SysV…

what does linus say about systemd?

Re: Shall we fork Debian?

#210

Post by rodgerd » Sun, Oct 19, 2014, 5:16 PM UTC

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.

> Am I the only person who prefers systemd?

No. I even gave a talk about how I came around to liking it at linux.conf.au this year. And I am a veteran *ix sysadmin.

Something I have noticed is that most of the loudest anti-voices have no actual technical arguments against it, and generally haven't even run a system with it for a month; you can tell because so many of them clearly don't even know the most basic syntax.