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Why Did It Take Devuan Two Years to Replace Systemd?

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Re: Why Did It Take Devuan Two Years to Replace Systemd?

#21

Post by dijit »

KirinDave wrote: post #11
yebyen wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that most people have a problem with systemd itself. Only some people. Usually it's a minor problem. But then you take it to the mailing list, and if it gets all the way to Lennart, he'll treat it like that's a "You" problem. I have not personally experienced this, but I've been in enough of these threads to realize that it's a big problem when, on a regular basis, you can't get these little problems so…

Either: Linus's behavior is fine and this is expected in the FSF community OR We burn all those MLs into the ground. Terrible culture in these projects is basically how everyone is conditioned to interact from the top down. We can't pick and choose which assholes are okay and which are not. We either push back on all of them to make a more professional environment or we accept this is what we want.

Let's get something distinct: Linus is like Gordon Ramsey.. If you should know better and you do junk work then you will be shit on.

I've seen Linus handle people numerous times who are learning or do not claim to be experts and he is always respectful, civil and a lot less blunt.

Not to mention the fact that when Linus is shitting on people it's often because they broke something for the "user"[0].

Lennart is not this way, he breaks userspace, he breaks norms and has a _huge_ ego. He conducts himself as if him and his crew are the only good programmers in the universe.

That is quintessentially _not_ the same as Linus.

[0]: User is a broad definition here, but it covers userspace programmers.

Re: Why Did It Take Devuan Two Years to Replace Systemd?

#22

Post by yebyen »

KirinDave wrote: post #11
yebyen wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that most people have a problem with systemd itself. Only some people. Usually it's a minor problem. But then you take it to the mailing list, and if it gets all the way to Lennart, he'll treat it like that's a "You" problem. I have not personally experienced this, but I've been in enough of these threads to realize that it's a big problem when, on a regular basis, you can't get these little problems so…

Either: Linus's behavior is fine and this is expected in the FSF community OR We burn all those MLs into the ground. Terrible culture in these projects is basically how everyone is conditioned to interact from the top down. We can't pick and choose which assholes are okay and which are not. We either push back on all of them to make a more professional environment or we accept this is what we want.

We can't really burn them to the ground either.

Also to that point... I've heard that Linus will grind you into the sidewalk for breaking userspace. I'm not sure that is the same thing that we are talking about.

I'm also not sure how accurate what I've heard is on the matter, but I think we absolutely can pick and choose which assholes are OK – the assholes that contribute to progress are favored over the assholes that impede it (for example, you may choose a different metric)

If you have a strong opinion and you back it up with facts, that's not just your opinion, it's an argument. If you have a strong opinion and you don't argue with facts, and you're not interested in opinions to the contrary, even when they are presented with strong facts, then you're just an asshole with an opinion, right? You can be inflammatory (I've heard that this is not just Linus, it's a national characteristic of Finnish people, and probably other nationalities too... again take with a grain of salt)... you can be an inflammatory asshole, but if you still present a coherent argument with solid facts and a sound rational basis, you may still advance the state of the art in spite of alienating some people.

Re: Why Did It Take Devuan Two Years to Replace Systemd?

#23

Post by dsfyu404ed »

pmoriarty wrote: post #9
KirinDave wrote: post #2

I keep waiting for the reasoned, technical arguments against systemd instead of veiled metaphors, complaints about its creator, or protestations that it's different. The initd-inspired community has resisted the push for declarative and component-based core system infrastructure for so long, and it's causing very strange distortions to the linux ecosystem as solutions get sought for the problems it introduces. System…

One of the main problems was the speed with which systemd was rolled out on all the major Linux distros, despite it being relatively immature and very controversial at that. The second major issue is it growing way out of the bounds of being just an init replacement, thereby violating the so-called Unix Philosophy of doing one-thing well. For a user app to do that is one thing, but for a core OS component to do that…

Don't forget security. When there's a problem with systemd shit hits the fan. When there's a problem with a widely used piece of software that only does one job the mess is smaller and easier to clean up.

Re: Why Did It Take Devuan Two Years to Replace Systemd?

#24

Post by mlinksva »

KirinDave wrote: post #2

I keep waiting for the reasoned, technical arguments against systemd instead of veiled metaphors, complaints about its creator, or protestations that it's different. The initd-inspired community has resisted the push for declarative and component-based core system infrastructure for so long, and it's causing very strange distortions to the linux ecosystem as solutions get sought for the problems it introduces. System…

I've purposefully avoided following the holy war, but somehow recently failed and noticed a new to me argument: systemd replaced lots of functionality wtih a memory safe implementation (shell scripts) with a memory unsafe implementation (C).

Re: Why Did It Take Devuan Two Years to Replace Systemd?

#25

Post by dijit »

wirrbel wrote: post #3

Sure, it might be because System D integrates so tightly with the whole ecosystem that it is hard to replace it. Or: Those folks who write rants about system d are not very active in contributing to a distribution that runs without it. With some discussions, you have that feeling that there are "those who talk, and those who do".

Unfortunately I'm a sysadmin, I deal with systemd/sysvinit every single day often dozens of times a day, but I do not have the means/skills to help remove integrations.

So, SystemD affects me daily and yet I can do nothing, I'm helpless. Which is why I'm rather vocal.

Re: Why Did It Take Devuan Two Years to Replace Systemd?

#26

Post by gorkonsine »

dredmorbius wrote: post #7
KirinDave wrote: post #2

I keep waiting for the reasoned, technical arguments against systemd instead of veiled metaphors, complaints about its creator, or protestations that it's different. The initd-inspired community has resisted the push for declarative and component-based core system infrastructure for so long, and it's causing very strange distortions to the linux ecosystem as solutions get sought for the problems it introduces. System…

You might have missed this: https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/7/6/577 Ted Ts'o: https://plus.google.com/+TheodoreTso/posts/EJrEuxjR65J "For me a lot of "good taste" is about adding complexity when it's needed, and avoiding it when it's not needed. And if you do have complexity, making sure you have the tools so you can debug things when they break. And for me one of the things that I don't like about systemd is that it has…

The problem I see with any complaints about Lennart's behavior is that his behavior is explicitly rewarded. No one is really "routing around the damage", unless they're taking the dysfunctional route of ignoring problems with the software. Lennart has been "crowned" with the position of being the de-facto leader of Linux init systems, since just about every distro that matters at all has adopted systemd. So unless the Linux community is going to adopt something different, or fork it and have some different leadership, I don't think they have much right to complain about Lennart's communication and leadership style. Don't put someone in a position of leadership and power and then whine that they're not doing things the way you want them to, unless you're prepared to back up your criticism with real action. The Linux community has apparently decided they're going to use Lennart's creation (and not fork it away from him), no matter what, so what's the use in complaining? People have been complaining about him for many, many years now, and he's obviously not going to change.

This reminds me a lot of everyone complaining so much about Windows 10. If you're not prepared to vote with your feet, your complaints are just wasted breath (or keystrokes) when the vendor obviously doesn't care one iota about your grievances.

Re: Why Did It Take Devuan Two Years to Replace Systemd?

#27

Post by horusthecat »

KirinDave wrote: post #2

I keep waiting for the reasoned, technical arguments against systemd instead of veiled metaphors, complaints about its creator, or protestations that it's different. The initd-inspired community has resisted the push for declarative and component-based core system infrastructure for so long, and it's causing very strange distortions to the linux ecosystem as solutions get sought for the problems it introduces. System…

It's not a holy war, but it does have a lot of politics, which engineers like to pretend don't exist.

Here is the only solid criticism of systemd I've read that focuses on design (as opposed to bugs that surface from the sprawling throw-it-over-the-wall approach to development): http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/10/11/0/

Notably, darknedgy hosted/hosts uselessd, which was a lightweight version of systemd. On the whole i think the idea underlying systemd, of graph-based management of services and system state makes more sense that wonky initscripts garbage.

Technical discussion aside, I rarely see mentioned is that, what in my opinion, systemd resembles a lot of "politics-driven-development" i've worked on before. It's sprawling and ambitious--which means bugs--and like a high-politics project there's a certain incentive i perceive to downplay bugs--which also means it's a great way for RHEL to centralize control over things they didn't have say in previously as well as standardize, etc.

I'll go ahead and beat up on it more by saying that if the project is going to be used cudgel-like, I wish it would more loudly start talking about stuff like formal analysis, fuzzing etc., because it would be a great opportunity to promote research-y stuff in the "email your patches" world of OSS development.

Which is fine, but running Arch workstations for nearly ten years now, there's been a lot of gore with systemd... more than i'd like to see in PID1.

Of course, I hate writing C code with a passion so I'm just a whiner really.

Re: Why Did It Take Devuan Two Years to Replace Systemd?

#28

Post by benchaney »

KirinDave wrote: post #2

I keep waiting for the reasoned, technical arguments against systemd instead of veiled metaphors, complaints about its creator, or protestations that it's different. The initd-inspired community has resisted the push for declarative and component-based core system infrastructure for so long, and it's causing very strange distortions to the linux ecosystem as solutions get sought for the problems it introduces. System…

> I keep waiting for the reasoned, technical arguments against systemd instead of veiled metaphors

It is interesting that you say that, because I am still waiting for the reasoned technical argument in favor of systemd.

Anyway, my main issue with systemd is how difficult it is to get rid of. It doesn't matter how awesome you think your software is, there is always going to be someone who disagrees. The beauty of FOSS is that it is easy to modify your system to suit your preferences. But for some reason systemd makes it difficult to switch. Even GNOME has a dependency on it. That seems completely insane to me.

>Systemd, for all its flaws, fixes some very important problems that init and runit and similar systems left unsolved.

I don't really know what you mean by this (and I hear people say it a lot). Systemd only rose to prominence in the last few years. Most systems worked just fine before then. What sort of significant open problems were solved by systemd?

> As far as I can tell, systemd is a holy war. It's the new editor debate. It's vi vs emacs vs sublime vs atom vs ... down throughout time, with people arguing where the tradeoff between simplicity of execution is more important than delivering a system people asked for.

There is a difference between systemd and the other holy wars, and that is that the other holywars were destined to end in a draw. No matter how much you like emacs more than vi, no one harbored the illusion that vi would stop easily installable on an average system. But for some reason a majority of the systemd supporters seem to view using an alternative as a serious crime.

Re: Why Did It Take Devuan Two Years to Replace Systemd?

#29

Post by dijit »

bandrami wrote: post #18

I mean, it is kind of strange that with one apt-get install, one apt-get purge, one apt-get autoremove, and one pinfile in /etc/apt, you can replace systemd in Debian. You'd think Devuan could just do that and redistribute or something.

Gnome and udev have hard dependencies on systemd now, parts of KDE do too (try installing k3b for example, can't be done without systemd).

It's not as simple as you think, unless the machine is a minimal deployment, in which case it works (I've got a docker host machine that runs runit instead of systemd)

Re: Why Did It Take Devuan Two Years to Replace Systemd?

#30

Post by antientropic »

dredmorbius wrote: post #7
KirinDave wrote: post #2

I keep waiting for the reasoned, technical arguments against systemd instead of veiled metaphors, complaints about its creator, or protestations that it's different. The initd-inspired community has resisted the push for declarative and component-based core system infrastructure for so long, and it's causing very strange distortions to the linux ecosystem as solutions get sought for the problems it introduces. System…

You might have missed this: https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/7/6/577 Ted Ts'o: https://plus.google.com/+TheodoreTso/posts/EJrEuxjR65J "For me a lot of "good taste" is about adding complexity when it's needed, and avoiding it when it's not needed. And if you do have complexity, making sure you have the tools so you can debug things when they break. And for me one of the things that I don't like about systemd is that it has…

I don't really get this. Linus and Lennart both are opinionated and tend to be pretty convinced that they're right. The difference is that Linus, if he feels you're wrong, will tell you that you should be retroactively aborted (https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/6/495), and part of the HN readership will applaud this as a wonderful example of no-nonsense project leadership. From what I recall from the systemd-devel mailing list, Lennart can be dismissive or perhaps arrogant (i.e. opinionated), but is seldom rude.
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