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Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

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Re: Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

#241

Post by jeroenhd »

cbolton wrote: post #237
jeroenhd wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mind the inevitable death of System V. It's an archaic relic of the Linux era. Going systemd-only is not necessarily a good choice (though I do understand it from a practical point of view). There are other, better alternatives for System V that are smaller and more modular so you still get the Unix "feel" without the absurd complexity of interlinked shell scripts that System V relies on. I'd like to see Open…

I think systemd is the one to learn now if you want to learn Linux. Maybe someone can make a Unix from Scratch for people more interested in the Unix philosophy than Linux per se.

systemd is most certainly the most pragmatic service to learn, but if you're doing LFS to "learn" how a Linux system gets brought up, something lower-level may be a better idea to pick up.

Re: Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

#242

Post by roenxi »

pjmlp wrote: post #177
nine_k wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Runit is 5474 SLOCs. Most source files are shorter than 100 lines. Works like a charm. Implements an init system; does not replace DNS, syslog, inetd, or anything else. Systemd, by construction, is a set of Unix-replacing daemons. An ideal embedded system setup is kernel, systemd, and the containers it runs (even without podman). This makes sense, especially given the Red Hat's line of business, but it has little rel…

I love how people worship UNIX design in Linux circles, especially when complaining about decisions where Linux is catching up with commercial UNIXes, as in the init systems replacements. UNIX design was so great that its authors did two other operating systems trying to make UNIX done right. One of the few times I agree with Rob Pike, > We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date. We…

And we've all heard of the linux people, as opposed to whoever is pushing these post-Cassidy OS. Linux isn't where it is because of some imperial decree, it has been winning out in a slow, protracted war for what OS programmers choose when they want to get work done.

Pike is more than entitled to an opinion, but I think there is some cause-effect reversal at work here. The linux circles aren't people driving the UNIX-love. The UNIX-love is effective in practice - especially the blend of principle and pragmatism that the linux community settled on - so the linux circles happen to be bigger than the most similar alternatives. Better alternatives are going to have to fight through the same slog as linux if they want recognition.

Re: Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

#244

Post by nesarkvechnep »

ptx wrote: post #217
rcxdude wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always dreaded trying to create a service with bash-based init scripts. Not only did it involve rolling a heck of a lot yourself (the thing you were running was generally expected to do the double-fork hack itself and otherwise do 'well behaved daemon' things), it varied significantly from distro to distro, and I was never confident I actually got it right (and indeed, I often saw cases where it had most definitely…

> the thing you were running was generally expected to do the double-fork hack itself and otherwise do 'well behaved daemon' things FreeBSD has a general utility that does this for you, daemon(8): https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=daemon&sektion=8

I also use it every time I need a service which should be restarted on crash. It's a very handy utility.

Re: Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

#245

Post by pjmlp »

imiric wrote: post #226
pjmlp wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that it didn't, Linux has nothing to do with UNIX design, it isn't a UNIX System V in 2026.

> Linux has nothing to do with UNIX design Respectfully, that's nonsense. Linux is directly inspired by Unix (note: lowercase) and Minix, shares many of their traits (process and user model, system calls, shells, filesystem, small tools that do "one thing well", etc.), and closely follows the POSIX standard. The fact that it's not a direct descendant of commercial Unices is irrelevant. In fact, what you're saying her…

Yet, UNIX or Unix proper descendents, have replaced, or complemented their init systems, with systemd like approaches, before systemd came to be.

So is UNIX design only great when it serves the message?

Re: Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

#246

Post by pjmlp »

fsflover wrote: post #238
pjmlp wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a book on that, gets posted every now and then on HN. In case you never read it, https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf Hardly the piece of OS beauty that gets praised about FOSS circles.

I'm not talking about the OS though but about the approach.

Goes to both, otherwise UNIX authors would not have tried to improve their creations, working on successors to both UNIX and C.

Re: Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

#247

Post by fouc »

its_magic wrote: post #196
M95D wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry to tell you, but I'm not really interested in a new distribution. I appreciate the effort of what you are trying to do, but I think you are wasting time maintaining a distribution instead of maintaining patches (or a fork). If you have the know-how to patch those cancers out, then do only that and let other people do the packaging. Just make them known and available - a github repo maybe? So, I'm not going…

Sorry dude, it's about 7 years too late to tell me to stop. If you like Gentoo, more power to you! It's not for me. This isn't just another run of the mill distro. It's like nothing else that's out there. I forgot to mention that I have PaleMoon on the system also, and it compiles in a much more reasonable time. Like two hours or so, I think. Chromium and WebKit are ginormous, and worse, they are compiled with the la…

Personally I've been boycotting all chromium forks for about a decade now. Could consider dropping chromium altogether :P

I guess there are alternative "forks" like QtWebEngine that just try to bring in only the blink engine part.

Re: Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

#248

Post by theICEBeardk »

pjmlp wrote: post #195
nine_k wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A project which is intended to be a learning experience in building a Unix variant (in this case, Linux) is a kinda right place for sticking to the Unix philosophy and design, for illustrative purposes. Mr Pike has indeed constructed a better OS than Unix; too bad AT&T neither knew how to achieve viral popularity, nor why Free Software (as in GPL) is going to dominate the world. By about 1995, it was already too late…

Not as much as people in Linux community think, especially those that never used commercial UNIX offerings. GPL is on its way out, a good example is that all Linux competitors in the embedded space, including Linux Foundation's Zephyr, none of them has adopted GPL. GPL based software is now a minority, almost everything uses licenses that businesses rather reach for.

I will be honest mentioning Zephyr in a situation when talking about how outdated the Unix design philosophy is, is a bit funny to me since Zephyr (like ecos kinda did once) tries to be Posix-like in its APIs (but ends up not really improving things over the other embedded OSes TBH).

Re: Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

#249

Post by greatgib »

tuetuopay wrote: post #205
greatgib wrote: post #105

The proof in the end that SystemD is a cancer in the Linux ecosystem. Officially it is just a stack and you can decide to use another one if you don't like it. Unofficially RedHat money ensured that other critical stacks will depend heavily on it so that you can't easily swap without replacing the whole ecosystem.

Where did you get that sweet RedHat money? I feel like I'm missing out, I'm happily using systemd, where are my RedHatBucks! Seriously, I would not ever go back to a house of cards of bash and shell scripts of an init system. systemd solves actual problems and gets shit done, with a level of consistency that cannot be achieved by LEGO-like wet-dreams of UNIX worshippers. My favorite example is systemd-resolve and sys…

It's like the good old time of Windows. You asked users, they would say that Windows is great, they don't have problems, works better than Linux. Oh do I get some error popups and crashes sometimes? Indeed just I forgot, I'm so used to close them without reading the message...

Systemd and co broke so many many things and so often that it is hard to count. A lot of things possible before are not anymore because of this giant ball of mud. It is just like the Windows monolith now.

Is it totally bad, no, for sure there are some advantages , but nowadays you will have issues, like network issues such as the one you describe and people will not know it comes from that.

Actually, before you almost never had to reboot or reinstall for anything. In case of boot issues and co, you would just need a console to be able to fix it. Systemd got even advanced users to be used to reboot and reinstall in case of problem as deep issues are often unfixables.

Re: Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

#250

Post by well_ackshually »

palata wrote: post #229
sxzygz wrote: post #156

Sadly is Linux is no longer what is used to be for my generation that cut their teeth having to patch kernels for basic hardware support. Linux is now effectively systemd/linux, and is attempting to become flatpak/systemd/linux through various corporate sponsored initiatives. The only thing worse, in my eyes, are people who distribute things as docker containers. The Linux distro as such is becoming an anachronism. T…

> Linux is now effectively systemd/linux This is my issue with systemd. I wanted Linux because I wanted to have a choice. The philosophy was that users should have a choice. Systemd goes against that: it's taking over everything and more and more projects require systemd. Flatpak as well: if a project only supports flatpak, chances are that it won't be easy to package normally. So if I don't use Flatpak, I'm screwed.…

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