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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

#91

Post by bkor »

e7620 wrote: post #72
bkor wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also said: > My objection is that it's both pervasive and unauditable. You said it was unauditable, it has already been audited. Adding arbitrary limitations to this doesn't change that.

I didn't downvote you, but I want to audit it myself, thanks.

I also help out at Mageia, the systemd packager (Colin Guthrie) is fairly busy but does find the time to add patches to systemd package (e.g. backporting fixes). Before systemd was integrated, he also fixed a fairly important journald bug. He doesn't work for Red Hat. Every time before systemd package is upgraded, he performs a lot of testing, often pushing things upstream again. It's not without bugs by far. Reason it is stable is continued coordinated effort across distributions. If you check the release notes of some versions there are fairly big changes every so often. It requires a bit of expertise to sort that out. Though a lazy distribution could just wait a little and backport the "stable" marked patches.

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

#92

Post by vertex-four »

exelius wrote: post #83
vertex-four wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 standardiz…

> 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.

Absolutely. I'm just sad that the people behind the solution are making it harder and harder to replace that solution for people who'd like to, and anybody who sees the issue with that is labelled a "troll" or a "hater".

On the other hand, at least you can parse systemd unit files to convert them into whatever (nosh has a utility to do that). I think that's going to be a standard well after the Linux community diversifies from systemd. It's a fairly solid format.

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

#93

Post by sprash »

bkor wrote: post #42
pessimizer wrote: post #9

I have none of these objections to systemd. My objection is that it's both pervasive and unauditable. I can accept one or the other. I don't have to rely on 'many eyes' to tell me what's going on with init scripts, I can just look. systemd is sprawling, has no particular philosophy that I can notice, and all of its internal systems are heavily interconnected; this leads me to expect that very few people will be audit…

Red Hat has audited the code in the past. The boot time bit is an item from the linked article. The thing is that systemd provides more than just an init system. Stuff that's pretty useful.

Red Hat is a military contractor based in America. This means they can be forced to introduce vulnerabilities under a gag order.

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

#94

Post by e7620 »

bkor wrote: post #89
erhardm wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 per…

> GNOME doesn't rely on systemd, it wants an API

The problem is the following: GNOME depending on GTK+? Just an API.

Of course, it's not your fault, the problem is systemd developers don't want to separate the components as individual programs. So if you want to use logind you also have to install the whole systemd, requiring linux to boot. (pun not intended)

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

#95

Post by papaf »

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?

One alternative is dnsmasq.

No really. Systemd now includes a caching DNS server and DHCP. Another alternative is ntpd. No really. Systemd now includes a time daemon.

Being intellectually lazy I like to think of the alternatives as "choice" and "linux".

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

#96

Post by e7620 »

bkor wrote: post #91
e7620 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't downvote you, but I want to audit it myself, thanks.

I also help out at Mageia, the systemd packager (Colin Guthrie) is fairly busy but does find the time to add patches to systemd package (e.g. backporting fixes). Before systemd was integrated, he also fixed a fairly important journald bug. He doesn't work for Red Hat. Every time before systemd package is upgraded, he performs a lot of testing, often pushing things upstream again. It's not without bugs by far. Reason…

The problem is that systemd is taking a lot of work better spent in other parts of the project. Instead of testing systemd, it's better to user simpler components, systemd is evolving, introducing more bugs, and people like that packager have to make a Herculean effort instead of using other init system, even sysv! and improving other applications.

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

#97

Post by qznc »

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…

This execline looks interesting. I use the fish shell, which also abandons POSIX compatibility for simpler parsing. Of course, the "this is not UNIXy" cries are plenty.

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

#98

Post by washadjeffmad »

bkor wrote: post #41
rthomas6 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could someone just fork systemd and make a version that relaces the init system and nothing else?

That's uselessd. Software however relies on the other bits, e.g. logind dbus interfaces. For that there is a systemd-shim, but was not there initially and used to lag behind systemd for a 6+ months. Apparently it was also quite buggy. Seems ok now though.

To clarify, uselessd (http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/) is "a project to reduce systemd to a base initd, process supervisor and transactional dependency system, while minimizing intrusiveness and isolationism", not just the parent making a joke in the phrasing.

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

#99

Post by stock_toaster »

e7620 wrote: post #87
stock_toaster wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think Linux has an edge in driver support, and corp vendors -- especially for gaming with things like Steam.

I really like some of the things the pc-bsd folks are doing though. Lumina seems to be coming along nicely.

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

#100

Post by the_why_of_y »

e7620 wrote: post #94
bkor wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 per…

> GNOME doesn't rely on systemd, it wants an API The problem is the following: GNOME depending on GTK+? Just an API. Of course, it's not your fault, the problem is systemd developers don't want to separate the components as individual programs. So if you want to use logind you also have to install the whole systemd, requiring linux to boot. (pun not intended)

There is a difference of several orders of magnitude in size and scope between the GTK+ API and the logind DBus interface.
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