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Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

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Re: Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MIT et al are winning over GPL for a reason. I'm not a big corporation. I prefer MIT, or better yet, public domain.

Are they winning as in more people are picking the license or are they winning as in we are getting a overall more enriched foss community? I don't understand why people have such difficulties with the Golden Rule, sounds a simple and fair enough concept.

We are winning as in "we have more freedom to do as we like without a bunch of lawyers breathing down our necks."

Freedom and liberty are what I value. There is no harm occurring to software as a result of more freedom or more liberty. Quite to the contrary.

Is your Golden Rule "you will use 'my' software exactly how I dictate, or else I'll call my dogs to attack you"? That's not the one I was taught.

I release all my code in the public domain.

Re: Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

#362
post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that book is a waste. It is just MIT dunning-krugerites who were salty that LISP machines never took off. When it comes to real life, the bell labs approach won, and for several good reasons. Not "worse is better" (another dunning-krugerite cope), but "less is more."

Turns out free beer is great, even when it is warm.

From your perspective, what would be an "OS done right"? I have a running list of things I would change in Unix, but replacing sysvinit with systemd's one-ring-to-rule-them-all would not be on it.

Re: Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

#363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they winning as in more people are picking the license or are they winning as in we are getting a overall more enriched foss community? I don't understand why people have such difficulties with the Golden Rule, sounds a simple and fair enough concept.

We are winning as in "we have more freedom to do as we like without a bunch of lawyers breathing down our necks." Freedom and liberty are what I value. There is no harm occurring to software as a result of more freedom or more liberty. Quite to the contrary. Is your Golden Rule "you will use 'my' software exactly how I dictate, or else I'll call my dogs to attack you"? That's not the one I was taught. I release all m…

Why are you acting so strange and making up misinterpretations of what I wrote? You depend on lawyers either way, whichever license you use, I fail to see how copyright law can be implemented and defended without lawyers. The golden rule is simple, anyone can look it up, I really don't understand what difficulty you have that made you make up such a strange "not even wrong" theory about it. "do to others what you would have them do to you" , here it means you have benefited from countless man hours of work by other people, so you too should pass on any improvements you made to it just like they did to you.

Regarding freedoms, let us take this scenario. Your small company depend on a complex bsd library thats hard to replicate. It gets the attention of a much larger company, they fork it make various changes to make it much better and keep it closed, their product kills yours. While, if it was GPL (or AGPL as its needed today), the company either has to redevelop it inhouse if they wish to serve it as product to the public without releasing its sources, or they do the same thing as in the bsd case, they make a much improved version...and you have equal access to the same sources, you can take that and pivot upon it instead of your company dying. Its very simple, more or less mathematical game theory. Nobody can force anyone to choose a license, its your choice. Again, Mac OS is not a very encouraging example of the overall outcome of BSD licensing. No freebsd/openbsd/whatever person is permitted to read or use Apple's "fork" now. Apple took the hard work of others and instead of paying it back in like, it doesn't take a single cent of money, "paying" back here simply means doing the same the others did, they generously provided you their work as foss, you pass back your delta to it as foss. Thus raising the high water mark of the entire ecosystem. Think academic research. Its usually released in open, so any improvements made by one team are available for others to use and further improve upon. That's it. Nothing more. Nothing less. How does GPL "force" anyone to do anything? They can either choose to follow the license, or choose another library or home grown an alternative if they dislike the terms.

Re: Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

#364
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure, and systemd would translate that directly into a dependency on network startup... You'd think so, but the Github Issue linked by GP shows that the machinery is unreliable: In practice, adding `_netdev` does not always force systemd to [consider the mount unit a network mount], in some instances even showing *both* local and remote ordering. ... This can ultimately result in dependency cycles during shutdown w…

It's so refreshing to discover that the "I found one bug in systemd which invalidates everything" pattern continues in the year of our lord 2026.

Just one bug? No, there's way more than that.

Re: Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

#365
post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I said, everyone wants Win32. What flavor is up to debate, everyone has their own incorrect opinions.

It would be much unlike Microsoft if they didn't bring Win32/Win64 compatibility along for the ride somehow, and very stupid also, because as you say that is the real core of Windows in a lot of ways. I have no idea what they're planning or why, just guessing, as they seem to be bringing Linux and Windows closer together all the time.

> It would be much unlike Microsoft if they didn't bring Win32/Win64 compatibility along for the ride somehow, and very stupid also, because as you say that is the real core of Windows in a lot of ways.

This requires NT API compatibility due to applications using NT API. Despite Microsoft telling devs don't use the NT API, devs use the NT API and Microsoft makes adjustments to ensure compatibility.

> I have no idea what they're planning or why

Clearly, because the whole idea not only makes no engineering sense, it makes no financial sense. They need to build the NT kernel anyway -- it runs the entirety of Azure services!

Re: Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody complains about a very wide variety of only vaguely related utilities being in the Gnu coreutils tree.

Nor the 20 or so odd reimplementations of various filesystem drivers and LUKS encryption in the grub2 tree. But, who is counting?

I'm tired of grub too. That's one of the packages on my shitlist. Currently it is broken on my system, as it has been in the past from time to time. I'm tired of the unreliability and have decided to write my own bootloader instead. It will be simple and bulletproof.

I already laid the basic foundation and have the kernel loading into memory and booting. Next step is to get the memory map and pass that along. It's BIOS only for the moment; EFI support will come later, along with other architectures. (PowerPC is next.)

Re: Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

#367
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the day, system run levels were seen as desirable. SysVinit went in on that concept to the max. So, if the concept of run levels isn't clear to the student beforehand, the init system for making it happen would therefore be mystifying and maybe even inscrutible.

Runlevels may be an interesting idea (e.g. the single-user maintenance level). But a bunch of shell scripts, each complex enough to support different commands, sort-of-declare dependencies, etc, is not such a great idea. A Makefile describing runlevels and service dependencies would be a cleaner design (not necessarily a nicer implementation).

On the contrary, I much prefer a full Turing complete language rather than trying to shoehorn my ideas into someone else's limited system.

The scripts don't have to be complicated, and it doesn't have to be shell scripts. You can use any script or executable that the Linux kernel can load and run. But shell scripts work great and have all the power needed.

Systemd is a giant, flaming heap of buggy ass code. Good riddance to it.

Re: Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

#368
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we look on LFS for its academic merit, I'm saddened that key historical elements of Unix/Linux design are being left behind, much like closing down a wing of a laboratory or museum and telling students that they'll need to whip up their own material to fill in those gaps.

LFS never had academic, educational, or pedagogical merit. It was always sheer faith that by doing enough busywork (except the truly difficult stuff), something might rub off. Maybe you learn some names of component parts. Components change.

Could you expand on this comment please? (I don't think your viewpoint should be so rudely dismissed through downvoting and moving on.) What do you mean?

Re: Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

#369
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SysV was this weird blind spot for many years. I remember installing daemontools on the OpenBSD server my office ran on because it was nicer to work with, and thinking that the Linux world would switch to avoid losing that particular feature war with Windows.

Gentoo Linux has been using OpenRC for at least as long as I've been using it (~25 years). It's unfortunate that OpenRC was unable to summon the manpower to do the spot-additions required for it to win the political war way back when Debian was looking to move from straight SysV init.

It would have never happened. Systemd wasn't chosen because "we the people" chose it. Things don't work like that anymore, regardless of what the marketing brochure might say.

Re: Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

#370

SysV init was the overengineered cousin to BSD init and I never liked it. Easily my least favorite of all init systems I've worked with over the last 30 years. On the flip side, daemontools or maybe runit were my favorites. Lots of good options for init/supervision tooling over the years and SysV was not among them.

It's always a little amusing when the Open Source Tea Party bemoans the lack of "the UNIX way" and someone else with actual historical experience (and not misguided nostalgia) brings perspective. On a related note, X11 was never good and there's a whole chapter in the UNIX-HATERS Handbook explaining why.

It was never good? Weird. Works fine for me.

When will Wayland earn the label "good"? I don't think it currently qualifies.

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