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Why pro-systemd and anti-systemd people will never get along

uselessd.darknedgy.net

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Re: Why pro-systemd and anti-systemd people will never get along

#21

Post by vidarh »

exelius wrote: post #13
erhardm wrote: post #7

I see the whole pro/anti systemd as a philosophical debate. Basically each part is arguing where the complexity should be in the system and how dense it should be distributed. I think we need two competing init systems to really know maybe in 5-10 years what the best trade-offs are. A modern sys V init and systemd.

I think the point is that you can't have two competing init systems: the market will eventually need to standardize on one of them or risk forking the entire Linux ecosystem. What you call "modern sysv" would look a lot like systemd depending on your definition of modern. I think that definition of what modern should look like is what's being debated here. The big features sysvinit are missing require user space appl…

We've had multiple competing init systems for years without forking the entire Linux ecosystem any worse than before.

Re: Why pro-systemd and anti-systemd people will never get along

#22

Post by pessimizer »

wmf wrote: post #20

If systemd is bad for servers, why did RHEL[1] and CoreOS adopt it? Are we to believe that these companies work against themselves? [1] AFAIK 90% of Red Hat's revenue is from servers, not desktops.

You're either asking the wrong people, or making a silly argument.

edit: both redhat and CoreOS have email addresses, as far as I know.

Re: Why pro-systemd and anti-systemd people will never get along

#23

Post by vidarh »

ck2 wrote: post #19

I don't want anything bad to happen to Lennart, I just want him to take his football and go home. Then suddenly init.d will look very open and friendly again. Maybe the same thing can happen to grub2 and I wouldn't mind going back to good old grub.conf

> Then suddenly init.d will look very open and friendly again.

Having used systemd on a few machines by now, I won't ever go back. It's utterly naive to think that systemd would go away if Lennart were to.

Re: Why pro-systemd and anti-systemd people will never get along

#25

Post by erhardm »

exelius wrote: post #13
erhardm wrote: post #7

I see the whole pro/anti systemd as a philosophical debate. Basically each part is arguing where the complexity should be in the system and how dense it should be distributed. I think we need two competing init systems to really know maybe in 5-10 years what the best trade-offs are. A modern sys V init and systemd.

I think the point is that you can't have two competing init systems: the market will eventually need to standardize on one of them or risk forking the entire Linux ecosystem. What you call "modern sysv" would look a lot like systemd depending on your definition of modern. I think that definition of what modern should look like is what's being debated here. The big features sysvinit are missing require user space appl…

They're good points, but from the philosophical point The Unix Way, systemd leaves some things to desire. Is there a modern Unix way? I don't see a lot of exploring in this area/side, but I see a lot of this is the way it's gonna be from now on on the other side.

I'm not on either side, but I appreciate the way some complexity is dealt with simple little things. So elegantly solving problems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0mviKhVmBI#t=450

Re: Why pro-systemd and anti-systemd people will never get along

#26

Post by justincormack »

fidotron wrote: post #11

It will be very interesting to see how this all plays out in the long run, though the short term is utterly depressing. My hunch is Lennart will be vindicated, on the basis that systemd as it exists right now is not right, but it can be evolved into something much better, and while that may not have occurred to other projects here the stakes are enormous. There is a definite strand to the resistance that any change t…

Yes, I have a side project to experiment with scripting the OS with Lua [1] - it has enough functionality to bring up a system (networking, mounts, namespaces etc) without any other code.

[1] https://github.com/justincormack/ljsyscall

Re: Why pro-systemd and anti-systemd people will never get along

#27

Post by killnine »

uselessdguy wrote: post #15
fidotron wrote: post #11

It will be very interesting to see how this all plays out in the long run, though the short term is utterly depressing. My hunch is Lennart will be vindicated, on the basis that systemd as it exists right now is not right, but it can be evolved into something much better, and while that may not have occurred to other projects here the stakes are enormous. There is a definite strand to the resistance that any change t…

Shell scripting isn't "archaic nonsense" at all, it's just that the warts from how most shells implement their command language (ksh/bash/POSIX sh) are holding us back. If you go look at Plan 9 rc shell scripts, you'll see how much cleaner they are. In addition, the s6 people have done some interesting things with execline (which looks kind of like Tcl), which works as a chain loader instead of holding the shell resi…

I wish I could up-vote this more than once.

+1 for the bash comments

+1 for the toy projects

Anyone remember how Linux got started?

Re: Why pro-systemd and anti-systemd people will never get along

#28

Post by fbt2lurker »

erhardm wrote: post #12
fbt2lurker wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why two? As many as people would write. There is already a bunch of em.

At least one of each side of the debate. Preferable there should be two, one on each side which implements the good/novel ideas and others where aggressive experimentation takes part.

There aren't actually two sides of this. There are only in the scope of systemd vs everyone else (just because systemd is something that is pushed as THE solution).

There are multiple solutions that all have their supporters. And we generally actually get along and work together pretty well. BEcause we don't think that one solution is necessarily better than the other in all aspects. It shouldn't be “provide a reasonable alternative to systemd and then we will compare”. “We” won't “compare” anything. Competition is awesome, “we” shouldn't “choose” just one implementation of anything just because the majority of distros uses it. It should be “let people do their thing and please don't hard-depend on this one init system or anything else without a really good reason to do so”.

Re: Why pro-systemd and anti-systemd people will never get along

#29

Post by adwf »

uselessdguy wrote: post #6
FreakyT wrote: post #3

Interesting discussion! I would have liked it if the author had provided some background information (for the uninitiated) about some of the other related issues mentioned. For example, what was meant by "the horrors of PulseAudio", "the udev debacle", and why was HAL bad? I realize that I could probably find out "bad things about HAL" via internet searching, but it would be more interesting to see the author's take…

I kind of stitched this essay together haphazardly, and it certainly does require some background knowledge to fully understand. Nonetheless, "the udev debacle" refers to systemd merging udev into its codebase, along with tying it to systemd's shared files, the recent "debug" parameter fiasco and the rather blunt statement by Lennart concerning migrating the transport to kdbus: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/s…

Pulseaudio is still crap for me. I can't get consistent volume across applications and it's 50/50 as to whether it'll recognize my headphones on any given day. I still rate it as crap compared to my nice stable ALSA setup.

So that really worried me when I found out Arch linux was switching to systemd! Thankfully it's all been ok as far as I can tell. Had to learn a few new commands and that's about it. Maybe it's different for the people actually configuring daemons, but as far as the end user goes, I haven't noticed any problems.

Re: Why pro-systemd and anti-systemd people will never get along

#30

Post by fbt2lurker »

erhardm wrote: post #12
fbt2lurker wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why two? As many as people would write. There is already a bunch of em.

At least one of each side of the debate. Preferable there should be two, one on each side which implements the good/novel ideas and others where aggressive experimentation takes part.

Just to be clear: I know that among the bigger projects it's just GNOME3 that is planning to hard-depend on systemd and even they want a shim, externnal or internal, to accomodate systemd-less systems (not necessarily BSDs, maybe other linux distros too). Currently systemd is very much optional (opt-out, not opt-in, learn the difference) and I personally mantain an Arch flavour that uses sinit, smdev and a bunch of other small projects while still relying on Arch's package base. It's the attitude of the upstream that seems like a threat: “we want everyone to use systemd”. And if they succeed, developers of userspace software will be very much justified in hard-depending on it. Who cares if everyone uses it, right?
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