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Debian developer prompted to revisit FreeBSD after 20 years

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Re: Debian developer prompted to revisit FreeBSD after 20 years

#61

Post by felixgallo »

rodgerd wrote: post #55
felixgallo wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) the unholy shitpile of init scripts was only a problem because the desktop guys who wrote the particular shitpile in question had no idea what they were doing. BSD is proof that you can write clean, sensible init scripts. 2) "which shows how young they are" -- what in particular is your issue with older, more experienced people, and how is that a problem enough for you to call it out?

> BSD is proof that you can write clean, sensible init scripts. Which, it turns out, are wholly underwhelming for many things people now want their init system doing. Hence launchd, SMF, and Jordan Hubbard's interest in an equivalent. But I guess the BSD developers working on the former and latter don't know what they're doing either, right? > what in particular is your issue with older, more experienced people I'm s…

An interest that one guy has is not evidence of the inability of many others to have written clean, sensible init scripts for several decades; which, as point of actual fact in this real world in which we actually really both exist, they have.

Shitty init scripts and the path to systemd have been self-inflicted wounds caused by a tiny group of inexperienced desktop developers. Such is life when you live in a local minima caused by your own incompetence, I suppose; even terrible, tasteless directions look like improvements.

Re: Debian developer prompted to revisit FreeBSD after 20 years

#62

Post by Alupis »

felixgallo wrote: post #61
rodgerd wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> BSD is proof that you can write clean, sensible init scripts. Which, it turns out, are wholly underwhelming for many things people now want their init system doing. Hence launchd, SMF, and Jordan Hubbard's interest in an equivalent. But I guess the BSD developers working on the former and latter don't know what they're doing either, right? > what in particular is your issue with older, more experienced people I'm s…

An interest that one guy has is not evidence of the inability of many others to have written clean, sensible init scripts for several decades; which, as point of actual fact in this real world in which we actually really both exist, they have. Shitty init scripts and the path to systemd have been self-inflicted wounds caused by a tiny group of inexperienced desktop developers. Such is life when you live in a local mi…

> systemd have been self-inflicted wounds caused by a tiny group of inexperienced desktop developers

Oh, you mean like Red Hat (the largest enterprise and server open source company on the planet)?

What about SUSE, Debian, Ubuntu... the list goes on...

Re: Debian developer prompted to revisit FreeBSD after 20 years

#63

Post by vertex-four »

rodgerd wrote: post #32
andolanra wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there were too many people in that debate who were dissatisfied with the idea of a new init system. People were dissatisfied with systemd specifically , because of various architectural choices that it made. The fact that FreeBSD might adopt a new init doesn't in itself mean that those people will be scared off.

> I don't think there were too many people in that debate who were dissatisfied with the idea of a new init system That's funny, because the loudest voices all seem to be insisting that an unholy shitpile of init scripts a la SysV was the One True Unix Way and had been forever (which shows how young they are, but I digress). The number of people pushing for smf/launchd equivalents (let alone working on them) is tiny…

> That's funny, because the loudest voices all seem to be insisting that an unholy shitpile of init scripts a la SysV was the One True Unix Way and had been forever (which shows how young they are, but I digress).

The arguments I've seen are mostly that it's possible to write clean, composable, independent programs with solid, well-defined APIs between them, rather than the monstrosity that is the systemd project.

Want to replace journald with something else? The API for doing that is not stable, and I suspect the build system doesn't make it easy. Want to initialise kdbus under another init system? Even though it should have absolutely no dependency on systemd whatsoever, the component which does so is tied into systemd and can't be removed from it.

On the other hand, there's systems like nosh[0] which prove that you can build UNIX-y composable programs to solve many of the problems that systemd set out to solve. If you want to replace the logger, go ahead! If you want some component of it without using the whole init system, that's doable too. With only a little work, I'm sure it'd be possible to run much of nosh as non-PID-1.

(Note that I'm not suggesting anyone use nosh - the code is a tad weird and it's hard to find things, and the build system is extremely non-standard. However, it makes a useful proof of concept that the tightly-coupled systemd is not the only way to build something better than the SysV init system.)

[0] http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jonathan.deboynepollard/Softwar...

Re: Debian developer prompted to revisit FreeBSD after 20 years

#64

Post by rodgerd »

felixgallo wrote: post #61
rodgerd wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> BSD is proof that you can write clean, sensible init scripts. Which, it turns out, are wholly underwhelming for many things people now want their init system doing. Hence launchd, SMF, and Jordan Hubbard's interest in an equivalent. But I guess the BSD developers working on the former and latter don't know what they're doing either, right? > what in particular is your issue with older, more experienced people I'm s…

An interest that one guy has is not evidence of the inability of many others to have written clean, sensible init scripts for several decades; which, as point of actual fact in this real world in which we actually really both exist, they have. Shitty init scripts and the path to systemd have been self-inflicted wounds caused by a tiny group of inexperienced desktop developers. Such is life when you live in a local mi…

> Shitty init scripts and the path to systemd have been self-inflicted wounds caused by a tiny group of inexperienced desktop developers.

It's hard to take you seriously when you're not even wrong.

Re: Debian developer prompted to revisit FreeBSD after 20 years

#65

Post by 1_player »

floatboth wrote: post #25

"There are some other issues, too: FreeBSD ports make no distinction between development and runtime files like Debian’s packages do. So, just by virtue of wanting to run a graphical desktop, you get all of the static libraries, include files, build scripts, etc for XOrg installed." That's definitely a feature, not a bug! I hate how Linux distributions require you to install a thousand " -dev" or " -devel" packages.…

> I hate how Linux distributions require you to install a thousand "-dev" or "-devel" packages.

Except Archlinux (and Gentoo, probably).

Re: Debian developer prompted to revisit FreeBSD after 20 years

#66

Post by cwyers »

smutticus wrote: post #59
exacube wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But not everyone that uses Linux compile X libs or Firefox themselves (a very tiny fraction do). Why does it make sense to have include headers and source?

Disk space is cheap. If it really is a problem for you then work around it. But for most of us installing dev files makes sense if we ever need to compile something against those .h files.

Even if it is, bandwidth isn't particularly cheap.

Re: Debian developer prompted to revisit FreeBSD after 20 years

#67

Post by patzerhacker »

Alupis wrote: post #57
Sanddancer wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, how does one completely excise journald from a box running systemd. I'm not talking about passing messages through, I'm talking about complete, utter, wiping out?

journald is a dependency for systemd, but systemd is not a dependency of journald... in other words you can use journald on a system that does not have systemd. What you imply is equivalent to wanting to run Gnome without libgnome. If you want text logs, configure journald to pass things into rsyslog or whatever other logging subsystem you prefer (there are many).

So systemd is not a system of separable utilities then. Remove journald and systemd doesn't work.

Re: Debian developer prompted to revisit FreeBSD after 20 years

#68

Post by jgoerzen »

eleitl wrote: post #12

He seems to think in his comparison Debian comes on top. However, the points which he thinks are where Debian is stronger illustrate precisely where Linux has lost its way. Laptop support is lacking -- assuming you care about laptops, and care about suspend working out of the box. Guess what, suspend didn't work out of the box under Debian, either. Storage, he's forgetting that zfs is both a filesystem, and a volume…

I never said Debian comes out on top. In fact, I went out of my way to say "use the right tool for the job." There are cases where FreeBSD is better and cases where Debian is better. To take something as complex as a modern operating system and say one or the other is always better would be foolish.

But, to address the questions: suspend does work out of the box for many laptops on Debian, including suspend on lid close, and has for years.

ZFS as a volume manager - I specifically addressed this. ZFS is not a suitable volume manager for everyone because it is fairly rigid once a zpool is set up. You cannot expand a raidz1 nearly as easily as a RAID-5 in Linux. (You have a stripe the data across another storage group.) You can't shrink a zpool at all. These are limitations that matter in some, but not all, setups.

Support of alien filesystems may be irrelevant for many servers, but it is not for all. But anyhow, people use an OS for more than just servers.

Virtualization -- believe it or not, there are people that need ways to run Windows. Sometimes a whole lot of Windows.

Dropbox -- lacking something that can to instant auto-syncs is a feature? That's pretty presumptious.

There is a big difference on desktop environments and configuration. Install Debian and with a simple selection of "desktop environment", it boots up into a working DE. FreeBSD -- not so much. Install a bunch of packages, exit some polkit and hal files, and then you'll get there. Well, if you thought to run pkg inside typescript so you see what pkla files to edit.

Re: Debian developer prompted to revisit FreeBSD after 20 years

#69

Post by worklogin »

xenophonf wrote: post #49
worklogin wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really like that FreeBSD has binary package management. I started my journey into Unix almost 10 years ago with FreeBSD Unleashed. I am considering writing a comparison command-to-command of apt-get vs. pkg, and differences in behavior. * Are packages from the FreeBSD repos pinned the same way Ubuntu packages are, relase to release? Are there multiple repos (comparable to universe/multiverse, updates/backports)? *…

Right now, there's only a single package repository for each major FreeBSD release. The ABI doesn't normally change within major releases, so packages built on FreeBSD 10.0 will work on FreeBSD 10.1 (and vice verse). A pkgng repository can contain older versions of packages, but "/latest" is tree of symlinks to the most recent versions in the repo. The FreeBSD Ports Tree isn't tagged, so there's nothing equivalent to…

Interesting, I'll have to test some of the features to see how they stack up.

In ubuntu, main = FOSS supported by Canonical, restricted = non-FOSS supported by Canonical, universe = community FOSS, multiverse = community non-FOSS.

Those usually don't get updated or messed with except for security. There is also the backports repo for package updates for stable releases.

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