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Why systemd is winning the init wars and other things aren't

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Re: Why systemd is winning the init wars and other things aren't

#111

Post by vidarh »

theBlackDragon wrote: post #93
hactually wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't object to systemd itself, but I do object to systemd invading my servers that work just fine without it. I think the Lennart and the Red Hat engineering team have more important things to do than covertly install systemd on your server. Please quit with the hyperbole.

And there you exactly pinpoint the problem. The FLOSS movement used to be about caring about other people and projects. RedHat* and its employees only give a damn about their use-cases and the rest of the "community" can go to hell. Which, of course is a logical stance to take for any corporation, however how easily everyone goes along with it is just appalling. *this, of course, goes for every corporate entity, thou…

Everyone "goes along with it" because they've evaluated it and decided it fits their uses cases too.

Redhat does not have the power to force anyone to adopt systemd.

Re: Why systemd is winning the init wars and other things aren't

#112

Post by TheCondor »

pdkl95 wrote: post #96
drewcrawford wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dispute here is philosophical. You want a distribution that follows The Unix Way. Where init does its little job and dbus does its little job and so on. Small, simple tools. But there is another way. A way that believes that when you unite the core tools into one powerful process you can do cool things. These cool things have been proven, from the basics like faster boot times, to more advanced features like savi…

I would generally agree with this. This philosophy (along with it being Free Software) is why I chose to migrate to Linux in the first place, so long ago: it was Unix . Ya, ya, "Unix-like", technically, due to the trademark on Unix. That last statement is very strange: > Fedora that they ought to be Unix As somebody who wore an authentic Red Hat fedora for many years, this makes no sense. They've certainly called the…

Modern Linux distributions don't tend to honor "The UNIX philosophy" is a common theme these days, or so it is said by a vocal group. The GNU tools tend to be more feature rich then many of their counterparts, often with performance advantages and usability but more is more and more code tends to mean more bugs. Fedora is in many ways the leader of this, it and Ubuntu are symbolic to those folks.

The irony here is that they can go fork all of this stuff, it's not like none of it has forked before, if they don't like redhat they can run something else. Getting passed off and forking is also the UNIX way

Re: Why systemd is winning the init wars and other things aren't

#113

Post by drewcrawford »

pdkl95 wrote: post #96
drewcrawford wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dispute here is philosophical. You want a distribution that follows The Unix Way. Where init does its little job and dbus does its little job and so on. Small, simple tools. But there is another way. A way that believes that when you unite the core tools into one powerful process you can do cool things. These cool things have been proven, from the basics like faster boot times, to more advanced features like savi…

I would generally agree with this. This philosophy (along with it being Free Software) is why I chose to migrate to Linux in the first place, so long ago: it was Unix . Ya, ya, "Unix-like", technically, due to the trademark on Unix. That last statement is very strange: > Fedora that they ought to be Unix As somebody who wore an authentic Red Hat fedora for many years, this makes no sense. They've certainly called the…

> They've certainly called themselves a unix (in the generic, no trademark),

At one point, they probably were a Unix. But Unix as a place and Unix as a goal are two very different things. Both skiers and mountainclimbers find themselves at the tops of mountains.

> When the term "Linux" is used in general, we mean a unix.

You mean a Unix. I mean Linux. There is no "we".

> So yes, refugees from Windows coming over to distros that have always been unix(-like) and trying to change them into the some sort of Windows-like junk is a problem.

I don't believe you. Where are these vanguard Unix-style Linux distros? RHEL? Adopting systemd. Debian? Adopting systemd. SUSE? Adopting systemd. These are distributions from the days of old. They have formed a consensus that systemd-style Linux is the future.

I mean I think it is fair to say that the Linux community is divided on this issue. But characterizing the systemd/dbus/ufs folks as "Windows refugees" is totally inaccurate. Systemd has the backing of important community members of the Linux community.

Re: Why systemd is winning the init wars and other things aren't

#114

Post by nailer »

pipy wrote: post #89
nailer wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also a huge amount of redundancy inside, and between: - SysVinit - xinetd - atd - crond - supervisor - syslogd and the other things systemd replaces. 'Small, single purpose tools' is Unix philosophy. But DRY is engineering philosophy. Each repeated piece of logic doubles the scope for errors. One could also argue that 'doing one thing well' is handling services .

Systemd is controlled by Red Hat in a way in which critical system components including kernel haven't been controlled before. Not by single corporate entity. That's what we know about this company from an old (2007) article: > “When we rolled into Baghdad, we did it using open > source,” General Justice continued. “It may come as a > surprise to many of you, but the U.S. Army is “the” single > largest install base f…

Interesting. Most of my work with Systemd has been via CoreOS, which is linked to GregKH, who was actually a SuSE dude.

Re: Why systemd is winning the init wars and other things aren't

#115

Post by nailer »

hactually wrote: post #106
pdkl95 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not seeing any justification for why these tools HAVE to be a single, monolithic tool. > script glue That's what shell scripts[1] are FOR - they are the minimal glue that binds the large applications together. Besides, "big brittle mess" is a matter of opinion. Are you trying to tell me that this OpenRC script is a "mess" that needs to be replaced, taken from /etc/init.d/cupsd my current desktop: #!/sbin/runscri…

So my cups.service is: [Unit] Description=CUPS Printing Service [Service] ExecStart=/usr/sbin/cupsd -f PrivateTmp=true [Install] Also=cups.socket cups.path WantedBy=printer.target It requires no extra things - Your cups script depends on checkpath and start-stop-daemon. More executables, more dependencies so yeah, I'd argue it suffers coupling and is a mess. You say that systemd makes things a "complex, interdependen…

The other super awesome thing about systemd is: all errors and output from this service is captured by journald with 'cupsd' as the source.

Compare this to SysV init, where you have to manually wrap stuff in syslog calls (and the facility names are 'uucp' and 'news' rather than anything meaningful). <3

Re: Why systemd is winning the init wars and other things aren't

#116

Post by blueskin_ »

pekk wrote: post #101
blueskin_ wrote: post #94

Because nobody wants Canonical to control a critical part of their distro.

Better to have Red Hat in control of Debian, then?

In preference to Canonical, yes.

systemd is more open, has a greater count of contributors, and is already more widely adopted with more distros planning their move to it. I'm not saying it's without problems, but anything (including keeping sysvinit) is better than Upstart.

GNOME is practically a Red Hat project these days, but people aren't advocating its removal (although yes, GNOME is awful since 3.x)

As it is, Red Hat already maintain or otherwise have a hand in a lot of things that are in Debian - seeing them as somehow adversarial isn't true, while Canonical have a long tradition of keeping their own work close to their chest and not sending improvements upstream.

Re: Why systemd is winning the init wars and other things aren't

#117

Post by rcxdude »

falconfunction wrote: post #11

What about openrc? https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Comparison_of_init_systems What's up with the words words words

I believe the main reason it wasn't really considered in the debian discussions was that they couldn't find any real documentation of it.

Re: Why systemd is winning the init wars and other things aren't

#118

Post by Xylakant »

theBlackDragon wrote: post #93
hactually wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't object to systemd itself, but I do object to systemd invading my servers that work just fine without it. I think the Lennart and the Red Hat engineering team have more important things to do than covertly install systemd on your server. Please quit with the hyperbole.

And there you exactly pinpoint the problem. The FLOSS movement used to be about caring about other people and projects. RedHat* and its employees only give a damn about their use-cases and the rest of the "community" can go to hell. Which, of course is a logical stance to take for any corporation, however how easily everyone goes along with it is just appalling. *this, of course, goes for every corporate entity, thou…

> The FLOSS movement used to be about caring about other people and projects.

Was it? I thought the primary driver was "I had a problem, this is the fix for my problem, maybe it helps you. I share this solution, you share yours.". Which basically holds true nowadays: Systemd solves Redhats problems. If it solves enough problems for enough people then it will prevail and other people might enhance it to fix their problems as well if they deem it a viable foundation. If it doesn't, then systemd will remain a niche solution that fixes redhats problems - which would totally be fine with me.

Given that we have the discussion on the debian list I'm inclined to believe that at least enough people think systemd is it to give it a push. If you don't like it stick with what you like or roll your own, but don't bitch and moan about redhat building a software that suits their use-case primarily and giving it away for free.

Re: Why systemd is winning the init wars and other things aren't

#119

Post by dschiptsov »

d0 wrote: post #75
dschiptsov wrote: post #20

The same way any other crap (such as Windows, Java, PHP, NodeJS, Docker - you name it) wins - its winning is due to a "catchy meme" about it, which triggers an automatic, ignorant snap-judgement of an unsophisticated consumer. Look, with Java you don't have to think about hardware and OS - a greatest meme ever (and you have to pay for tons of hardware because Java = waste). NodeJS - you could code server-side apps th…

At least windows has a decent and stable init system though!

I think it is debatable whether or not a relation between words "windows" and "stable" makes any sense.

Re: Why systemd is winning the init wars and other things aren't

#120

Post by bitwize »

theophrastus wrote: post #6
ChuckMcM wrote: post #2

Interesting follow-up, this stuck out for me: "To start with and as usual, social problems are the real problems." This really resonates with me. Once any organization gets to a certain size, getting change to happen is more "social problem" and less "technical problem." When you don't select for people at that stage who can move an entire organization over to a new way of doing things, your organization will stagnat…

yes indeed social problems. or as one of my favorite quotes goes: "Trust no one! The minute God crapped out the third caveman, a conspiracy was hatched against one of them!" --Col. Hunter Gathers, OSI (Venture Bros parody of Hunter S. Thompson)

One of the reasons why the Blue Man Group perform in groups of three is because if you have one person, you have one person. If you have two people, they either agree or disagree. Three is the minimum number of people it took for there to be an outsider.
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