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

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

#81

Post by e7620 »

nanoscopic wrote: post #78
e7620 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From the perspective of the average linux user ( one that knows little to nothing about linux internals ) the entire discussion is the real waste of energy. If all distros adopt "systemd/linux", a future plan for systemd according to lead developers, what happens if systemd collapses? It would take GNU/Linux with it. Remember how pulseaudio adoption by ubuntu drove users away. I want others to have access to UNIX,…

You think the systemd debate is bad? The same people who made systemd intend to totally change the way the entire system works, way past just services. See: http://0pointer.net/blog/revisiting-how-we-put-together-linu... Kiss goodbye to what you knew; it may be going the way of the dodo. Remember what happened to ReiserFS? Despite what you are saying being FUD it's not entirely unreasonable.

> You think the systemd debate is bad?

I think the debate is good and necessary, I don't like any software imposed without a debate.

Yes, I know, I was referencing partly that. Again, my position may be shocking to you: 1) I like change 2) I use a dozen init systems (!), each for a different situation, and I'm interested in keeping it that way.

You'll also be surprised to know that I use varios OSs! Never used ReiserFS, though.

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

#82

Post by chipsy »

hk__2 wrote: post #2

Could someone ELI5 this pro-systemd/anti-systemd thing?

It's political theatre, to some extent. The traditional "SysV init" mechanism is there to do things that are slightly above kernel space, but too global to be considered part of userspace; so things like user settings for power management, managing long-running daemon processes, and handling logins could all be part of the init.

The problem motivating a switch is that init is an underpowered solution for the number of things that a distribution is asked to handle these days; it results in a lot of hand-tuned scripts with duplicated effort.

Enter the politics. A lot of the value of a distribution can come down to how its init system has been built, since it means the difference between essential stuff working or not working. Systemd pushes the value and the accountability into a central location by annexing lots of different features that were traditionally just spread out amongst various interdependent scripts. There are a lot of straightforward technical advantages to centralizing some of these things(speed, simplicity of configuration, etc.), but everyone and their dog has an opinion about which things should or shouldn't be annexed, and the form in which it should be done. Many people's jobs are potentially at stake here.

The more conspiracy-minded also view systemd as a power grab from Red Hat. Red Hat's business substantially involves contracts with the military, lending circumstantial evidence to the idea that they are doing deliberate harm to serve state interests - thus everything they do is viewed with some suspicion.

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

#83

Post by exelius »

vertex-four wrote: post #71
exelius wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This debate has been raging for the better part of two years and many of these alternatives didn't exist when it started. Really though, systemd has the momentum and I don't see anything else remaining a mainstream alternative unless it just emulates systemd's functionality.

systemd's functionality isn't the issue - it's its architecture that is. An alternative bundle of software which is less strongly coupled would likely be accepted with open arms. I'd like to be able to pick what init system I want to use separately from what manages /dev and what handles my logging and what handles sessions/seats/logins. nosh's architecture allows for that, whereas with systemd, while it amounts to 6…

Yeah; I get the objections. More pragmatically, systemd was developed the way that it was, and for a large portion of its life there have been no credible alternatives that were objectively better.

But once systemd's behavior has become standardized, it becomes hard to change implementation details because its dependencies rely on not just what it does, but how it does the things that it does. You have to standardize on something, and it will inevitably be flawed because no system is perfect. Sysvinit is not adequate anymore (and I don't think you would disagree with that). Systemd was a solution that someone came up with, and was able to get a number of influential groups to agree to standardize on that solution.

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

#84

Post by makomk »

exelius wrote: post #43
hello_there wrote: post #37

What I really dislike about these debates about systemd is that usually nobody mentions the alternatives. From reading the debate I get the impression that both sysvinit and systemd have major problems, but I'm never presented with a solution. So if I'm going to be against sysvinit as well as systemd, then what should i be supporting?

The main alternatives seem to be OpenRC and Upstart. One of the biggest criticisms of systemd by its detractors is that it's unproven and not stable; and neither of these address that concern. Upstart was developed by Ubuntu, which has stopped supporting it and is adopting systemd because they recognized the need to standardize on a single system. After the Debian committee voted to go with systemd, Ubuntu (being a D…

You're right that OpenRC only replaces the layers above init, but that's where most of the interesting stuff happens. In a traditional sysvinit-based system, all the actual work of setting up the system, finding and running the correct init scripts, etc is done by shell scripts started by init. OpenRC replaces those shell scripts with a proper service management layer, with init's only jobs being to start OpenRC, spawn getty processes on terminals, and reap orphan processes.

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

#85

Post by sprash »

hello_there wrote: post #37

What I really dislike about these debates about systemd is that usually nobody mentions the alternatives. From reading the debate I get the impression that both sysvinit and systemd have major problems, but I'm never presented with a solution. So if I'm going to be against sysvinit as well as systemd, then what should i be supporting?

Support sinit (http://tools.suckless.org/sinit).

Look at the source and you understand the whole system within a minute. All of it.

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

#86

Post by stock_toaster »

e7620 wrote: post #70
nanoscopic wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people don't know much about any of the details. They have simply done things one way for a long time and now it is changing. You haven't addressed that besides accusing those people of being "ignorant about good design principles" and "having huge misunderstandings that leads to a lot of wasted energy." From the perspective of the average linux user ( one that knows little to nothing about linux internals ) the…

> From the perspective of the average linux user ( one that knows little to nothing about linux internals ) the entire discussion is the real waste of energy. If all distros adopt "systemd/linux", a future plan for systemd according to lead developers, what happens if systemd collapses? It would take GNU/Linux with it. Remember how pulseaudio adoption by ubuntu drove users away. I want others to have access to UNIX,…

> I want others to have access to UNIX, the best OS in the world, just like I had the opportunity.

Thankfully, there are several alternative free unix-like operating systems these days. Are they are popular as Linux? Do they have as much big business/corp backing as Linux? No and No. However, if Linux implodes there are great alternatives these days. I personally use and quite enjoy FreeBSD. ymmv.

* Linux (topic of discussion) * BSD derivatives: * FreeBSD / NetBSD / OpenBSD / DragonFlyBSD * Illumos (opensolaris) derivatives * SmartOS / OmniOS / OpenIndiana * Minix * more[1]

[1]: [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_operating_systems#Unix...

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

#87

Post by e7620 »

stock_toaster wrote: post #86
e7620 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From the perspective of the average linux user ( one that knows little to nothing about linux internals ) the entire discussion is the real waste of energy. If all distros adopt "systemd/linux", a future plan for systemd according to lead developers, what happens if systemd collapses? It would take GNU/Linux with it. Remember how pulseaudio adoption by ubuntu drove users away. I want others to have access to UNIX,…

> I want others to have access to UNIX, the best OS in the world, just like I had the opportunity. Thankfully, there are several alternative free unix-like operating systems these days. Are they are popular as Linux? Do they have as much big business/corp backing as Linux? No and No. However, if Linux implodes there are great alternatives these days. I personally use and quite enjoy FreeBSD. ymmv. * Linux (topic of d…

I agree completely, those operating systems are great, as good or better than GNU/Linux. But with that phrase I was thinking people without prior experience, like Windows users, FreeBSD install is fairly involved for them, there's PC-BSD, but it seems to me, distros like Mint are easier for beginners and useful as a stepping stone to those OSs.

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

#88

Post by makomk »

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.

It's a good weapon against Red Hat's proprietary Unix competitors like Solaris - by tying as many things as possible to systemd they ensure it can't run on non-Linux systems. Same reason the proprietary Unices had their own oddball service management frameworks, APIs, etc. Also, RHEL was still using the old, grotty sysvinit-based system where you had to manually specify the order in which services were started and stopped; almost anything's an improvement on that. (All the other major distros had migrated away from it ages ago.)

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

#89

Post by bkor »

erhardm wrote: post #63
bkor wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

systemd provides things and does things that are useful. That is why GNOME depends on those. Blaming us? Try actually understanding why. It's not a hard dependency btw, you still have ConsoleKit support. A project not maintained for almost 3 years or so. Then there is that systemd-shim. Initially very very buggy, but now ok-ish. OpenBSD is working on some shim thing as well.

Others working on systemd shims out of necessity is a sign, IMHO, that systemd is in reality a hard dependency in the near future (and developers trying to free from that dependency). I don't say systemd is not useful, GNOME using it shows also to good sides of it, but others feeling a little forced to choose systemd or The Unix Way I think is the wrong way to do it. Why can't we have both(modern init system and unix…

You're conflicting things. GNOME doesn't rely on systemd, it wants an API (a few actually, but AFAIK the only difficult one is the bits from logind). The entire API is hard to implement. The parts that GNOME uses maybe can be implemented by someone else. Maybe not. Someone from GNOME tried to do that for FreeBSD but gave up after a while (problem was the lack of interest, difficulty combined with not being a *BSD person). KDE also will use a small part of logind in case you use libinput as well as Wayland. But again it doesn't rely on systemd, it wants a dbus API.

If someone makes something else, go for it. But API wise it is best to stay the same.

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

#90

Post by agrover »

exelius wrote: post #38
erhardm wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not on either side myself, either. But "this is the way we've always done things" is a terrible reason to keep doing them that way. Systems change, requirements change, and so implementations and methods must change as well. I'm not saying this is warranted or not in the case of systemd (I don't know enough of the details to opine either way) but it has been a cultural problem in the Linux community for a number…

I think the fallacy is looking at the composability of tools on the command line and thinking you want/need the same composability in how the system runs. You don't. The Unix Way is actually TWO things: one is shellscripting and the composability of the command line, and the other is C and libraries. "Whipupitude vs manipulexity", to quote Larry Wall. Systemd is the result of determining that running system services is complex and needs to be handled by a real program instead of scripts. This is easier in C, but the flipside is the unavoidable loss of whipupitude. For most people this is fine. When Unix was young, whipping up something simple was fine. Now it isn't, and really hasn't been for quite a long time.
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