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Don't panic and keep forking Debian

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Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian

#71

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

cpncrunch wrote: post #59
gilgoomesh wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

systemd replaces a large number of startup and utility programs (specifically: sysvinit, pm-utils, inetd, acpid, syslog, watchdog, cron and atd). It also adds new daemons for logs, logins, locales, hostnames and a few other services. Most of this is a good thing. Faster. Newer code that is easier to maintain. Less reliance on shell scripts favoring declarative config files instead. But change has lots of difficulties…

I haven't used systemd yet, but I'm concerned about having to learn a completely new way of doing things. I manage a number of servers, and it would be a huge inconvenience figuring out systemd. The old way works fine for me. Unfortunately most of the servers I work with are CentOS, and it seems Redhat has switched to systemd so I'm not entirely sure what I'll do in future. I guess now I have another option.

"I'm concerned about having to learn a completely new way of doing things."

That's just a fact of life in this industry tho.

Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian

#72

Post by eumenides1 »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #61
SwellJoe wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, yet, it dominates the tablet and mobile environment, which is already more important than the desktop market ever was. Funny how that works.

Linux doesn't dominate the mobile environment. A very specific port of it, by Google, does. Given that it's Google , that's hardly a compelling argument. They could've made Windows NT dominant if they'd so desired.

No they couldn't make WinNT dominant if they wanted because WinNT's source code isn't freely available.

Linux doesn't describe one OS, rather a class of OSes. Like Cancer isn't a disease but a class of disesases, or functional programming isn't one language but a class of them.

Google is dominant because they dominiated. MS didn't dominate, google does, and it's not like both companies couldn't compete in a money fight. And this comes back to Windows NT not being dominant despite MS's wishes.

Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian

#73

Post by [deleted] »

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #70
chubot wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are good questions, but answering them won't fit in a comment. It takes more like a book. One of the best books on the Unix philosophy is "The Art of Unix Programming", which is available for free. (I recommend getting a hard copy and reading the whole thing.) http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ Other books include The Unix Programming Environment by Pike et. al., though it's less explicit about the ph…

Eric Raymond is not worth taking seriously except as a bad example. That aside, poking around I found this: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/InterfacePo... which looks like reasonably well-defined interfaces? Also not really seeing the problem with a binary protocol, works fine for tcp/ip.

[deleted]

Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian

#74

Post by cpncrunch »

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #71
cpncrunch wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't used systemd yet, but I'm concerned about having to learn a completely new way of doing things. I manage a number of servers, and it would be a huge inconvenience figuring out systemd. The old way works fine for me. Unfortunately most of the servers I work with are CentOS, and it seems Redhat has switched to systemd so I'm not entirely sure what I'll do in future. I guess now I have another option.

"I'm concerned about having to learn a completely new way of doing things." That's just a fact of life in this industry tho.

Yes, of course. I occasionally learn a new language (or develop one), and I'm regularly using new APIs. However this completely changes everything about managing servers, for no compelling reason. It will create a large amount of hassle for no significant benefit.

Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian

#75

Post by newscracker »

lelandbatey wrote: post #25
Aloha wrote: post #13

I'm for sure not feeling the love for systemd, it seems un-UNIX and a solution looking for a problem, and change for the sake of change. That said, not so big on the idea about a fork, I'd rather see debian do the normal debian thing, and support both things, maximizing freedom. That said, if that can't happen, a fork is inevitable - for the love of god pick a better name.

You seem like someone who's used a variety of init systems, so I have some questions: 1. Why is systemd considered "un-unix"? 2. Why is sysv considered to "follow unix"? 3. Can you provide or point to some explanations on the ideologies that motivate the difference of opinions regarding sysv/systemd? 4. Really, can someone provide some context and history for all this?

Quoting a few points from http://boycottsystemd.org/

"1. systemd flies in the face of the Unix philosophy: "do one thing and do it well," representing a complex collection of dozens of tightly coupled binaries1. Its responsibilities grossly exceed that of an init system, as it goes on to handle power management, device management, mount points, cron, disk encryption, socket API/inetd, syslog, network configuration, login/session management, readahead, GPT partition discovery, container registration, hostname/locale/time management, mDNS/DNS-SD, the Linux console and other things all wrapped into one.

...

3. Since systemd is very tightly welded with the Linux kernel API, different systemd versions are incompatible with different kernel versions and portability is unnecessarily hampered in many components. This is an isolationist policy that essentially binds the Linux ecosystem into its own cage, serving as an obstacle to developing software portable with both Linux variations and other Unix-like systems. It also raises some issues backporting patches and maintaining long-term stable systems.

...

7. systemd is viral by its very nature, due to its auxiliaries exposing APIs, while being bound to systemd's init. Its scope in functionality and creeping in as a dependency to lots of packages means that distro maintainers will have to necessitate a conversion, or suffer a drift. As an example, the GNOME environment often makes use of systemd components, such as logind, and support for non-systemd systems is becoming increasingly difficult.

...

9. systemd is designed with glibc in mind, and doesn't take kindly to supporting other libcs all that much14. In general, the systemd developers' idea of a standard libc is one that has bug-for-bug compatibility with glibc."

For more information, read through:

http://boycottsystemd.org/ - lot of links to follow

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd

Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian

#76

Post by chubot »

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #70
chubot wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are good questions, but answering them won't fit in a comment. It takes more like a book. One of the best books on the Unix philosophy is "The Art of Unix Programming", which is available for free. (I recommend getting a hard copy and reading the whole thing.) http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ Other books include The Unix Programming Environment by Pike et. al., though it's less explicit about the ph…

Eric Raymond is not worth taking seriously except as a bad example. That aside, poking around I found this: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/InterfacePo... which looks like reasonably well-defined interfaces? Also not really seeing the problem with a binary protocol, works fine for tcp/ip.

If you don't think the content of that book is relevant to the systemd debate, then you haven't read it. I'd like to see you point to a better book about the Unix philosophy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian

#77

Post by pekk »

fredoralive wrote: post #62
theophrastus wrote: post #3

See also: https://devuan.org/ as well as #debianfork and #devuan on IRC/freenode

That site does seem to show an odd disconnect, it seems to mention "init-freedom" alongside "...the first goal of removing systemd...". Surely true "init-freedom" would be to give the end user a choice between sysvinit, bsd init, sysmtemd, launchd, android's init, and so on. Of course such true init-freedom would be near impossible. IMO people should just pick one, forking appropriately, and stop having such huge arg…

Removing coupling which effectively mandates the use of systemd is a prerequisite for "init-freedom".

You can't offer a choice when everything requires systemd.

Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian

#78

Post by marcosdumay »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #65

On the one hand, this seems wildly misguided; the Debian distribution for people who don't want to run systemd is still just Debian, and that'll remain the case through at least jessie, and for as long as people continue putting effort into keeping it working. So it's sad that the effort going into this fork doesn't instead go into maintaining the necessary infrastructure in Debian. I'm sure the maintainers of system…

From the site, it looks they'll keep adding to systemd-shim and cgmanager.

Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian

#79

Post by new299 »

eloff wrote: post #5

The same freedom that leads to all the many, many flavors of linux gives a great diversity of ideas. The downside is it fragments the finite development efforts of the contributors to the point where it becomes difficult to compete with the wider marketplace. I wonder sometimes if it were possible for everyone to contribute to one linux desktop if the situation would be different today. As it stands, after nearly thr…

  The downside is it fragments the finite development efforts of the contributors to the point where it becomes difficult to compete with the wider marketplace.
Linux is a kernel. Linux distributions target a variety of different users, and that's where the fragmentation comes from.

I guess the problem is nobody really set out to build a Windows alternative at the beginning. As such they got what they set out to build, a powerful set of tools for building "things". It was never a coherent set of tools design toward making a comfortable user experience (grab a compiler from here, a windowing system from somewhere else, mash it all together).

Some distributions (I guess notability Ubuntu, and projects like KDE) have tried to polish what's available into something that's a good user facing experience. With varying success. Most of the issues here likely stem from a legacy of tools which were not designed to build a consumer facing system, and a lack of resources (and desire) to build a platform for the average consumer.

Others, have rewritten the userland (Android) and produced competitive consumer facing products.

Others, have continued to build what (I'd guess largely the developers) want, either to service their personal of commercial interests, things like Debian/RedHat.

So different distributions have targeted different users groups. I no more want to user an Android desktop than a Windows one. But I can see how Android could be far more competitive against Windows. The question is who wants to invest the resources in building that?

Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian

#80

Post by krylon »

secfirstmd wrote: post #44
krylon wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As if that was different on Windows. Windows only works smoothly until it does not, and then you inevitably have to invoke some command-line tool you never heard of before and won't find any documentation for, or you have to edit some arcane registry key. Most people I know who use Windows at home either call "that guy" they know who knows his way around a computer, or they just reinstall their system (which is not s…

Hmm, I possibly would have agreed with you up until XP, when it was very very buggy and crash prone, but after that for the average user I really doubt that is the case. Thought I think we can agree to disagree depending on our respective experiences.

My day job is managing a company network of about 100 Windows clients, running anything from Vista to 8.1.

I agree that Windows has gotten a lot better over the years, but if you have enough machines in one place, you see some pretty strange things happening, like MS Office breaking for no apparent reason, or an update to Office 2013 breaking Autodesk Inventor, forcing me to reinstall Inventor, thereby breaking Outlook, forcing me to reinstall Office (afterwards, both Outlook and Inventor continued to work - I have no idea why).

The chance for an individual user to experience such problems is fairly low, but as an admin / help desk monkey (we have no dedicated help desk, so I am the one users call for help) I get to see all those problems.

Let me repeat, Windows has improved a lot over the years, and I honestly do not know what it would be like to manage ~100 Debian or CentOS clients. I am not saying Linux deployed on such a scale on such a variety of machines would run without problems.

But you do run into those situations where you have to invoke some arcane command or edit the registry on Windows, too. And at least in my experience, if that happens on Linux, at least you can look at the man page for the command or the config file.

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