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Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

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Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#121

Post by belorn »

bandrami wrote: post #39
dashzebra wrote: post #25

Honest question here: why do people hate systemd so much?

Because "Stop Job Running For User 1001: (22s / 90s)" with no indication of which @$%^ing stop job it is is incredibly annoying. And the fact that "systemctl start blahd.service" exits successfully even if blahd didn't actually start because a misconfigured blahd not starting is "correct" makes me want to burn the server room down from time to time. And nondeterministic service initialization is absolutely Broken and…

In the old time with init scripts you had to figure out where to put all those sleep(10) based on the servers specific hardware and software stack. Far from everything in the initi script blocked execution until they completely finished, and things that previously worked could suddenly stop working if you changed hardware or software.

The big difference that created deterministic servers in the past is that you could install the server once and then leave it for 10+ years without doing any updates. People were proud of servers and services with massive uptimes with no patches and no reboots. I only see those now if they either have no internet connection or are locked down containers with very restricted network access.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#122

Post by embedding-shape »

egorfine wrote: post #100
embedding-shape wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But musl exists today? And even I use it from time to time, mostly I think in Alpine Linux. How was musl hindered if we can use it? Maybe it isn't as popular as you would have wanted, but I don't think that's the same as claiming it's been hindered by systemd.

> But musl exists today Yes and the systemd crowd wants to embrace and extinguish it as well [1] [1] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/v259-rc1/NEWS

I got to line 1500 before I gave up, what from that indicates they want to "extinguish" musl?

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#123

Post by the_why_of_y »

egorfine wrote: post #100
embedding-shape wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But musl exists today? And even I use it from time to time, mostly I think in Alpine Linux. How was musl hindered if we can use it? Maybe it isn't as popular as you would have wanted, but I don't think that's the same as claiming it's been hindered by systemd.

> But musl exists today Yes and the systemd crowd wants to embrace and extinguish it as well [1] [1] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/v259-rc1/NEWS

So if systemd refuses to support musl, it's "hindering the spread and innovation in the Linux space", and when they change their mind and work to add support for musl, it's "to embrace and extinguish it".

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#124

Post by IshKebab »

bandrami wrote: post #46
IshKebab wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember the time before systemd and there wasn't any innovation happening - everyone was content with hacky bash scripts.

Legible, discoverable, debuggable. They listed the commands the computer needed to run, in the order it needed to run them, to get the system running. It was absolutely beautiful. And then LSB came along and broke it, and as a result of that systemd now manages my home directory and cron tables. Shame, really.

Sure but not reliable, robust, integrated.

Fine for 80s mainframes... not so great for modern laptops.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#125

Post by teddyh »

ralferoo wrote: post #88
dashzebra wrote: post #25

Honest question here: why do people hate systemd so much?

For me, I guess several reasons: * Log files aren't where I expect them. I can't just tail the right log file, I have to figure out a load of options to journalctl instead. Its defaults are annoyingly bad and I usually end up having to type long things to limit the range to something useful. * The journal grows massively and is unbounded by default. Many times I set up a machine, and then it runs out of disk space. I…

> The journal grows massively and is unbounded by default.

Wrong. By default, the journals aren’t even saved to disk. And if you do configure them to be saved to disk, they are limited by default to 10% of the file system size, and at the most 4GiB.

> It took me about 30 minutes of googling

Just read the manual. Start with systemd.directives(7) and search for what you want, which will direct you to the correct manual page for that setting.

> Too many things just happen in the background that never used to.

The world is changing. Mounts aren’t static anymore; you must treat a mount just as a running service; run “systemctl stop srv-foo.mount” instead of just yanking out a file system from underneath the feet of any and all services which depended on that mount point.

> I never did figure out how to set the MTU in the configuration either.

“man systemd.directives”, search for “MTU”. Took maybe two seconds.

> Log files aren't where I expect them.

> I had to learn the new systemd way of doing it.

This, I strongly suspect, is your real problem.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#126

Post by IshKebab »

t43562 wrote: post #96
IshKebab wrote: post #31

Why though? Systemd has been a huge success, dragging Linux kicking and screaming into the modern world.

It lacks the UNIX philosophy really. Binary logs are a sort of example of the attitude it has. That's why there has been kicking and screaming that you mention. I have lots of 30-year old books on "Modern XXX" which makes you realise that the label is a bit meaningless. To put it another way, there are 30 year old operating systems with a much more "modern" design than Linux has...and we're not using them. It's not "…

> It lacks the UNIX philosophy really.

The UNIX philosophy is not a golden rule or inherently good. Nor is it even really well defined (what is a "thing"?). SystemD does one thing and does it well - managing Linux systems.

> It's not "modernity" per se that obviously tops the list of criteria or we'd be using something like BeOS or even Windows.

Just because modernity isn't the only criteria for success doesn't mean it is irrelevant.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#127

Post by teddyh »

remix2000 wrote: post #7

"Tricycle – Car Without Engine" Honestly though, the argument against systemd is that it moves too much stuff into init, but I don't think it does enough of that, it's still extremely conservative, like, SD-DBus should be using binder x-port IMO.

Systemd seemd to be moving away from D-Bus and adopting varlink instead.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#128

Post by teddyh »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #80
phendrenad2 wrote: post #6

I like Devuan because it matches the Linux I learned - people who learned with a Systemd distro might not like it as much.

I liked it coz I did remember the old ways (as in kernel 2.2.x old) and they fucking sucked. Few examples of bugs I had to fix in sysv that just can't happen in very simply written systemd unit: * multiple java based apps wrote pid in java which meant few secs after JVM started, so calling start -> status made status return app is not running, which tripped some tools * mysql wrote pid in /var/run which was (at that…

I agree; I was there, too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30312899>

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#129

Post by t43562 »

IshKebab wrote: post #126
t43562 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It lacks the UNIX philosophy really. Binary logs are a sort of example of the attitude it has. That's why there has been kicking and screaming that you mention. I have lots of 30-year old books on "Modern XXX" which makes you realise that the label is a bit meaningless. To put it another way, there are 30 year old operating systems with a much more "modern" design than Linux has...and we're not using them. It's not "…

> It lacks the UNIX philosophy really. The UNIX philosophy is not a golden rule or inherently good. Nor is it even really well defined (what is a "thing"?). SystemD does one thing and does it well - managing Linux systems. > It's not "modernity" per se that obviously tops the list of criteria or we'd be using something like BeOS or even Windows. Just because modernity isn't the only criteria for success doesn't mean…

What you define as "one thing" is not seen as one thing by those of us that aren't systemd fans. That's all it is really.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#130

Post by t43562 »

egorfine wrote: post #101
t43562 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The great thing is that there actually ARE options that are far better than init scripts and they don't have to be like systemd.

This is technically true. Problem is, they are way out of mainstream and thus are not really practical outside of niche applications like containers.

... or other niches like my laptops and desktops that I'm writing to you from.
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