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Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

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Re: Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

#111

Post by spijdar »

adastra22 wrote: post #96
clintfred wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With limited resources, sometimes practicality needs to win. Kudos to Bruce for putting aside his (valid) feelings on the subject and doing what is best for the team and community overall.

How is this best? It defeats the whole point. I’m going to stop recommending LFS to people wanting to learn about this stuff.

Learn about what stuff? Linux? System V UNIX?

I haven't done LFS since my tweens (and I'm almost 30 now), but I remember the sysvinit portion amounted to, past building and installing the init binary, downloading and extracting a bunch of shell scripts into the target directory and following some instructions for creating the right symlinks.

Obviously, you can go and check out the init scripts (or any other individual part of LFS) as closely as you wish, and it is easier to "see" than systemd. But I strongly protest that sysvinit is either "Linux" (in that it constitutes a critical part of "understanding Linux" nor that it's really that understandable.

But setting aside all of that, and even setting aside the practical reasons given (maintenance burden), when the majority of "Linux" in the wild is based on systemd, if one wanted to do "Linux From Scratch" and get an idea of how an OS like Debian or Fedora works, you would want to build and install systemd from source.

Re: Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

#112

Post by its_magic »

M95D wrote: post #110
its_magic wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got rid of dbus in GTK3 by patching the code so that the "accessibility bridge" (to ATK) can be disabled. GTK4 is beneath contempt and will not be supported. The system uses GTK2 wherever possible, or GTK3 when not. I will either port everything to GTK2 later or create some kind of shim library. Help wanted here. Porting back to GTK2 isn't hard, I just don't have time to work on any of that at the moment.

I'm running Gentoo without dbus and I'm stuck at gtk 3.24.34. I would love to see those patches. Your site appears to be down.

It's just HTTP only (no SSL) and there's nothing there. ... until now!

Here's some nice GTK3 patches for you:

http://killthe.net/patches/gtk-3.24.43-allow-disabling-atk-b...

http://killthe.net/patches/gtk-3.24.43-allow-transparent-win...

http://killthe.net/patches/gtk-3.24.43-allow-wheel-scrolling...

http://killthe.net/patches/gtk-3.24.43-appearance-tweaks-and...

http://killthe.net/patches/gtk-3.24.43-disable-mnemonics-del...

http://killthe.net/patches/gtk-3.24.43-file-chooser-tweaks.p...

http://killthe.net/patches/gtk-3.24.43-remove-dead-key-under...

http://killthe.net/patches/gtk-3.24.43-restore-old-context-m...

http://killthe.net/patches/gtk-3.24.43-set-default-settings....

http://killthe.net/patches/gtk-3.24.43-show-alternating-row-...

Note that GTK 3.24.43 is the last version of GTK3.

My system is full of patches like this to tweak, improve, and adjust things. The point is to get off the "upgrade" treadmill and focus on making things work right.

Re: Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

#113

Post by p_ing »

its_magic wrote: post #109
p_ing wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it has little relation to the Unix design It's more like Windows! /duck

I have been saying for years that Microsoft would eventually deprecate WinNT and switch Windows over to a Linux foundation. Things seem to be slowly but continually moving in that direction.

Makes no sense to dump a superior kernel and executive for Linux.

The Win32 layer is the issue, not the underbelly.

Re: Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

#115

Post by cyberax »

nomel wrote: post #108
cyberax wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're already reported. And ignored. Have you _seen_ the systemd issue backlog? The iSCSI loop issue: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/34164 It keeps popping up again and again and is summarily ignored. The remote FS detection also came up multiple times, and the maintainers don't care.

> and the maintainers don't care. I'm not sure that's fair. I think better proof of this would be a rejected PR rather than a neglected bug report. This is Linux, after all. Problems found with specific hardware are almost always solved by people with that hardware, not the maintainers, who are usually busy with the 99%.

The problem here is more fundamental.

Lennart refused to make all the /etc/fstab options available in regular mount units. And yes, there was an issue, no I'm too tired to look for it. The wording was pretty much: "Give up, and gtfo, this is not going to happen. Just because."

I'm convinced that systemd can't be fixed by its current team of maintainers. They are just... untidy.

I don't know about you, but if I end up writing low-level code that _needs_ to know whether the mounted file system is "remote", I won't do that by comparing against a hard-coded list of filesystems inside PID0. Or by using wild heuristics ("if it's on a block device, then it's local").

I would put these heuristics in a helper tool that populates the default values for mount units. Then allow users to override them as needed. With a separate inspector tool to flag possible loops.

Re: Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

#116

Post by josteink »

Timon3 wrote: post #106
josteink wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All I want is init scripts and X11, but the horizons are shrinking. I've already compromised with systemd, and I don't like it. I see BSD in my future Freedesktop wants to kill X11 and are working continuously on that, to the point if rejecting patches and banning developers. Popular desktop environments are increasingly depending on Linux-only things. KDE has officially removed support for FreeBSD in Plasma login…

> Freedesktop wants to kill X11 and are working continuously on that, to the point if rejecting patches and banning developers. Are you referring to the developer of Xlibre, who submitted multiple broken patches & kept breaking ABI compatibility for little to no reason[0]? Or someone else? [0]: see discussion & linked issues in the announcement https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44199502

I’m talking about that developer, yes. And I’m sure there’s more to the story than just ABI compatibility.

He wanted X11 to thrive. Freedesktop however has a goal for Wayland ultimately to replace X11, right? X11 should die. This is not hyperbole. It’s a stated goal.

So I think there’s more to the story than the simplified ABI aspect often mentioned here on HN.

Also Gnome killing X11 support is real.

So is KDE backing down on BSD-support.

These are facts, not opinions.

Re: Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

#117

Post by bryanlarsen »

fragmede wrote: post #88
5G_activated wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and grub is a rotting pile while systemd-boot is a simple boot entry multiplexer that rides off the kernel's capability of being run as an EFI executable, it just happens to live in systemd's tree. not a good example

It's a pretty good example of why people think systemd is bloated and does too much. It's a simple boot entry multiplexer. Does it need to live in systemd's tree?

Nobody complains about a very wide variety of only vaguely related utilities being in the Gnu coreutils tree.

Re: Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

#118

Post by adastra22 »

spijdar wrote: post #111
adastra22 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this best? It defeats the whole point. I’m going to stop recommending LFS to people wanting to learn about this stuff.

Learn about what stuff? Linux? System V UNIX? I haven't done LFS since my tweens (and I'm almost 30 now), but I remember the sysvinit portion amounted to, past building and installing the init binary, downloading and extracting a bunch of shell scripts into the target directory and following some instructions for creating the right symlinks. Obviously, you can go and check out the init scripts (or any other individua…

For me, Linux From Scratch is not about compiling linux from scratch, but on building up an entire Linux distro from the ground up, understanding how every piece fits together.

Doing it via systemd is like drawing a big black box, writing LINUX on the side, and calling it a day.

Re: Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

#119

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

mhurron wrote: post #92
WhereIsTheTruth wrote: post #35

Just rename Linux to SystemD OS at this point..

Excuse me, that's GNU/SystemD/Linux.

You joke, but it's a decent comparison. Both GNU and SystemD are projects with a bunch of miscellaneous tools with excessively strong coupling. In GNU's case that's the various userland tools relying on glibc. Both are used in the majority of Linux distros, and while there are distros without them they're not particularly mainstream. Many tools expect their options & custom ways of working, e.g. huge numbers of shell scripts are BASH-specific and need GNU coreutils instead of being portable POSIX shell scripts. Both make developers' lives easier compared to the lowest-common-denominator required by POSIX, which makes sense because POSIX is intended to be a common subset of functionality found across different UNIX OSes.

It's not a perfect equivalence, of course, SystemD diverges more from other UNIXes than GNU does.

Re: Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

#120

Post by csb6 »

adastra22 wrote: post #96
clintfred wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With limited resources, sometimes practicality needs to win. Kudos to Bruce for putting aside his (valid) feelings on the subject and doing what is best for the team and community overall.

How is this best? It defeats the whole point. I’m going to stop recommending LFS to people wanting to learn about this stuff.

"best" meaning the best decision the LFS team can make given their limited, unpaid time and resources. They feel maintaining guides for two parallel init systems is unsustainable even though they would prefer not to have systemd as the only option.
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