So: what linux distributions don't use systemd by default?
Of the major distros, only Slackware and Gentoo.
And in Gentoo, it is optional.
Shall we fork Debian?
231–240 of 284 posts
Re: Shall we fork Debian?
#232Just use coreOS and docker on the server and leave the init system discussion to the desktop people. There are some fundamentally different and sometimes conflicting requirements regarding the startup process on a server and on a desktop machine and I think systemd which is obviously desktop driven will be the catalyst for a split between server and desktop distros. I don't think classical desktop environments have m…
Sorry, are you being sarcastic or you really don't know that systemd is the other central piece of CoreOS, together with Docker?
Re: Shall we fork Debian?
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since when have init.d scripts been anything but brittle?
SysV init is brittle only for desktop scenarios, where many things can change between reboots. On servers I've always found it to be very predictable. Once you fix an issue, it usually stays fixed. I haven't ran into many startup race conditions in servers. SysV init has many problems and can be improved upon, but solutions that increase complexity exponentially and are impossible to reason about when problems arise…
How many things can really change between reboots on desktop? That i yank one GPU and install another? VGA is still VGA as a fallback, no?
Frankly the only bus i can see being much of a issue on desktop is USB. And that is mostly if you are relying on a ethernet dongle or similar that ended up moving from port 1 to port 2 between boots.
Yes, this means your desktop may not get connection until you sort out the new name of the port. But that is a niggle, not a world ending scenario that require the full replacement of everything between the kernel and the desktop environment.
All in all, systemd looks like a solution in search of a problem. And if it has remained Poettering's personal project and distro variant i don't think many would have raised a stink (and those that found it interesting would have adopted it on their own time).
Re: Shall we fork Debian?
#234I 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…
> C is very insecure for daemon coding with all other options why no use go for example? What's sysvinit written in? What are bash and dash written in? What are coreutils written in?
What the kernels are written in?
Re: Shall we fork Debian?
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
There needs to be a distinction between Linux distros for us, and Linux distros for everyone else. For us, we care about all that stuff, because we are engrossed in it daily. For everyone else, they will never touch or understand and / or should never need to understand what a kernel, filesystem, sound system, or desktop environment is. To them, the computer is a tool, not an environment, and to use it is to press bu…
Thing is, Debian is already effectively (since Ubuntu) a Linux distro that's supposed to be for us. People who want a nice desktop experience go with Ubuntu, people who want a server reach for Debian. If the higher ups at Debian really think they're going to be a player in desktop and are making decisions along those lines, then they must be seriously oblivious to the niche that Debian has actually settled into post-…
Your distinction is both wrong and too simplistic. Debian has a perfectly respectable Desktop, and Ubuntu has more than a good server product.
Choosing between them depends more on technical and project requirements.
Whilst I am not a fan of SystemD, it is important to remember that it came from RedHat.. you know, the people famous for servers.
SystemD will be a good init for Server, as it will be for Desktop. i am pretty critical of SystemD, but something is better than Sysvinit. I'd have favoured Upstart, but that doesn't matter... SystemD won, people need to deal with it. This is a good evolution for Linux.
Re: Shall we fork Debian?
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think you're wrong. I imagine all these people saying systemd is so awful are just worried that their hard-earned sysvinit knowledge will become obsolete and that new users won't have to go through silly bash scripts (that are totally secure of course - no chance of security vulnerabilities in something as ancient and wtf-free as bash). Instead they'll have something sane like this: [Unit] Description=Apache…
I think this Debian fork talk is a bunch of nonsense, but so is your comment. It's the classic "systemd or sysvinit" false dichotomy, as evidently a ton of Linux users have never stepped out of their cage to ever look at anything else. Besides all the sysvinit alternatives (like depinit) that have popped up throughout the years, fixed most of its deficiencies and were promptly ignored, even having a shell-based boot…
You're totally right about the false dichotomy, but I don't see why you think other init system were ignored.
Debian used a really open process to decide the new default init system where every developer could propose any init system provided that someone offered to maintain it.
Since SysVinit, systemd and Upstart where the only ones with a credible maintainership (OpenRC didn't work on Debian until a few week after the discussion started) the discussion was centered on those three.
So it's not like other init system were ignored, it's just that noone bothered to do the actual work to make them suitable replacements.
My hypothesis is that systemd was the first to provide enough benefits to motivate people to implement the switch in Debian.
From a distribution maintainer the fact that systemd tackles many loosely related problems is an actual benefit, since now said maintainer just need to coordinate with an upstream project instead of having to maintain dozens of special snowflake systems (eg. to set the hostname). This is what most systemd critics fail to accept.
Oh, and the shell is nice but it's one of the worst languages to implement anything non-trivial, http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/filenames-in-shell.html is enough for me welcome the idea of getting rid of it in the boot process. :)
Re: Shall we fork Debian?
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that they care(d) much about "the open source community". And why do you think forking causes damage to the open source community? It helps resolve conflicts of interest.
I know they didnt care (there wasnt any significant OS community at the time) and even if they did its not reason to remove a core feature of like fork, because someone might abuse the idea. It was a kind of pun to state my disaproval to level of fragmentation the linux community has gotten into. Okay this SystemD saga might or might be AS important as some people tend to think. But fragmenting the community so much…
Indeed. Reducing fragmentation is one of the reasons many distribution maintainers liked systemd, since it replaces tons of special snowflake tooling that every distro reimplemented differently with one common upstream (eg. set the hostname, configure binary formats, where to store the OS release name, etc.)
Re: Shall we fork Debian?
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 co…
> It is hackers and people who care about software, not so much for proper manners.
IMO this is the attitude that encourages toxic behaviour in the open source community. Hackers should not be exempt from standards of civil discourse.
Re: Shall we fork Debian?
#239Please fork Debian. I find it very difficult to get behind a movement whose primary complains are that the status quo is "a slap in the face to the _____ philosophy" and "betrays the _____ philosophy" and so on. If you want to sway me, you have to tell me why your way is better. The alternative is "offensive" to you? I cannot begin to describe how much I don't care. You can tell a lot about a movement by those they s…
The problem is most of us are just quietly moving to freebsd.
Re: Shall we fork Debian?
#240Earlier 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…
> "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". Even if this claim were actually true -- what's wrong about that? Why should someone move to a new immature system if his current one works perfectly for him? If an Apache server works perfectly for me why should I invest time and…
> If other people prefer SystemV why don't they simply let them go?
You are free to fork Debian and modify it as you wish.