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Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

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Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#161

Post by bandrami »

t43562 wrote: post #135
belorn wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Init scripts were horrible Here's a dinit service file for starting my bluetooth daemon: type = process command = /usr/lib/dinit/dbus-wait-for -s -f 4 -n org.bluez /usr/lib/bluetooth/bluetoothd smooth-recovery = true logfile = /var/log/dinit/bluetoothd.log depends-on = dbus depends-on = local.target before = login.target ready-notification = pipefd:4 This is about as complicated as it gets - ones I make myself might…

I still would love somebody to explain to me what's "dodgy" about a shell script that runs the commands you want run...

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#162

Post by blueflow »

hiciu wrote: post #159
blueflow wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Initially i hated systemd for the change it bought and lennarts behavior, but today I'm wiser. Today i hate systemd for its bad debugability (edit unit & daemon-reload loops), the lockups that happen whenever there is a fifo in the wrong place, and the processes that systemd spawns with no apparent related unit and without means to mask them. And the difficult to disable suspends on machines that never had any busine…

Could you please expand bit more about those processes that systemd spawns without units? Cgroups in Linux kernel, and systemd-cgls tool should let you trace every process to a source

ibus and goa both run under dbus.service.

I ran into this problem because ibus runs later than setxkbmap and undoes the keyboard settings.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#163

Post by Cu3PO42 »

t43562 wrote: post #131
Cu3PO42 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gnome, for example. GDM now needs systemd's userdb. It is indeed becoming harder and harder to avoid and I understand that this isn't great , but systemd tackles some genuinely hard problems that others don't. Which is to say I don't begrudge Gnome devs for this and personally prefer systemd over current alternatives.

which current alternatives have you tried?

I've looked at OpenRC, RUnit and S6. I haven't recently run any of them "in production", however.

Personally, I am a strong believer that declaring the desired state is a lot easier to get right than actually writing the code to get there. Beyond that, I'm not saying any of these are bad at being what they are, systemd just has more features, some of which I really like. Two examples I'm actively using currently are automount units and socket activation (S6 also has socket activation). I have some remote folders mounted via SSHFS automatically when I access them and this is incredibly useful for my workflow.

Could I find tools to slot into other init systems that do this for me? Probably. But systemd has this neatly packaged up, easy to configure and easy to introspect state.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#164

Post by mid-kid »

embedding-shape wrote: post #143
benterix wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK you're missing the historical context here. To make this story extremely short, the author of Systemd was already known for another project that was causing problems to Linux users but was shipped early. And when Systemd was released, it has several issues, too, so some distros like Debian withheld the switch. But at some point the folks at Red Hat decided to tie Systemd to the login mechanism for Gnome. I don't b…

Ok, yes, I wasn't aware of the history, I use whatever my distribution uses as default, and been doing that for decades now, as that tends to be less hassle, so been using systemd for a while because of that. With this new knowledge about the history, I still feel the same as the original question. AFAIK, no one is forcing people/distributions to adopt systemd. It might be easier, and most takes the easiest route, bu…

The problem is mostly that programs started depending on aspects of systemd that are both very complex, and difficult/impossible to implement without ending up with systemd. Systemd's components don't play well with established standards (sometimes not running standalone at all), which contributes to the feeling of having to buy into the whole ecosystem just to use a small part of it, just for that one bit of a certain program that now depends on it.

This has happened with gnome's display manager, and now gnome-shell is threatening to cease functioning without systemd, as well as on systems that systemd doesn't run on such as the BSDs. KDE's new login manager is now doing the same, so in many respects, people's fears have been validated.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#165

Post by mid-kid »

cbolton wrote: post #81
blueflow wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With everything depending on systemd interfaces, its an exhausting uphill battle to run anything desktop-like without systemd. Want to run xterm? Requires Xorg. rootless Xorg requires udev, udev turned into a systemd component. want to run xterm without systemd? good luck, you are now the maintainer of your own LFS.

The udev developers decided that it made sense to move udev into systemd. If you disagree and want choice, you can fork udev. Actually some people did that, so you can run xterm with eudev instead of udev and thus avoid systemd (though eudev seems hardly maintained now, with the latest release in 2023). I think it's true that it's an exhausting battle to keep all those parts independent when 95% of the devs/money agr…

eudev was just a copy of the udev part of systemd, with some patches to build on musl, and work without systemd. All of that has been upstreamed now, LFS has instructions on how to build udev from the latest systemd release, without building systemd itself.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#166

Post by direwolf20 »

McDyver wrote: post #21
GuestFAUniverse wrote: post #9

I don't care: I can administer with relatively high confidence any Redhat- or Debian-derivate. Thanks to systems. Most issues regarding systemd I encountered were due to a halfway adoption (Debian). Some things like timers are a bit more cumbersome than "the old way", but I wouldn't want to miss the added robustness. Most things systemd implements lead to _less_ issues. And writing a systemd unit is pretty easy, cont…

That's good for you! Isn't that a selfish view, though? "Works for me,so I don't care that systemd is creating dependencies everywhere for everyone else". I appreciate that it simplifies some things, but I can't understand that you can't choose which parts of it to install, or even replace parts of it with alternatives. Isn't linux about choice? It feels we're going on a downwards spiral where choice is being taken a…

You have the choice to use either Debian or Devuan.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#167

Post by direwolf20 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #26
McDyver wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's good for you! Isn't that a selfish view, though? "Works for me,so I don't care that systemd is creating dependencies everywhere for everyone else". I appreciate that it simplifies some things, but I can't understand that you can't choose which parts of it to install, or even replace parts of it with alternatives. Isn't linux about choice? It feels we're going on a downwards spiral where choice is being taken a…

How is it someone's else's fault for that systemd has dependencies or that others depend on systemd? If I use and like Firefox, and others depend on Firefox, or Firefox depend on others, then it's Firefox fault for you choosing Firefox? I really don't understand the argument you're trying to make. You had choices before systemd, and you still have choices even though systemd is widespread, what's the problem? It isn'…

If Google spends millions of dollars pushing Chrome on everyone, then it's their fault everyone is using Chrome.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#168

Post by direwolf20 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #143
benterix wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK you're missing the historical context here. To make this story extremely short, the author of Systemd was already known for another project that was causing problems to Linux users but was shipped early. And when Systemd was released, it has several issues, too, so some distros like Debian withheld the switch. But at some point the folks at Red Hat decided to tie Systemd to the login mechanism for Gnome. I don't b…

Ok, yes, I wasn't aware of the history, I use whatever my distribution uses as default, and been doing that for decades now, as that tends to be less hassle, so been using systemd for a while because of that. With this new knowledge about the history, I still feel the same as the original question. AFAIK, no one is forcing people/distributions to adopt systemd. It might be easier, and most takes the easiest route, bu…

To be clear: systemd works fine to start/stop services. Usually. If you have a working system with systemd, it's rarely worth ripping out and replacing. That's just more risk than reward.

But that doesn't mean it's good.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#169

Post by direwolf20 »

belorn wrote: post #118
blell wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Red Hat created hard dependencies on systemd in all of the popular software they develop to ensure its adoption.

I don't get it. If you install openbsd, you get dependencies that openbsd developers has chosen. You can try to remove every aspect of those choices but at some point it won't be openbsd anymore. Is the claim here that Red Hat is unnecessary coupling their critical parts of the distribution in ways that other distributions would not do? A few examples here would be nice.

OpenBSD is a monolithic system with kernel and userspace developed together. Linux was a bazaar.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#170

Post by direwolf20 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #85
account42 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Embrace extend extinguish tactics, now celebrated in Linux land.

You had choices before, you still have choices, how is that EEE? There never been more distributions available.

At every stage of EEE, you have choices. All but one are made more unappealing as the EEE process progresses.
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