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Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

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Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#71

Post by embedding-shape »

blueflow wrote: post #65
embedding-shape wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> hindering the spread and innovation in the Linux space What "innovations" have been prevented or hindered by systemd? I guess you could argue "well, we can't know" but then what is the argument here really? I'm guessing there is something concrete your thinking about here, that systemd made impossible, but I'm not understanding what you're referencing, I can't recall anything like that.

alternate libc's like musl. the eglibc controversy showed this was necessary but poettering initially refused to support a "non-useful libc". his words.

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.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#72

Post by PunchyHamster »

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…

> 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.

we had tens of thousands of init scripts where we fixed that exact problem with init scripts that were delivered with distro. It's not systemd problem and if anything systemd made it better.

> And nondeterministic service initialization is absolutely Broken and Wrong.

if your dependencies are wrong but init system works you were just lucky.

If you gonna complain, complain about no option to tell machine to shut down in a given time interval which means "my UPS got 5 minutes left pls turn off" is unsolvable under systemd unless you go thru every single unit file in distro and override their timeouts.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#73

Post by PunchyHamster »

_flux wrote: post #4

It seems though not having systemd in it would be against "init freedom": https://www.devuan.org/os/init-freedom . Or is there some particular criteria an init system needs to satisfy to be included, that systemd doesn't satisfy but the others do?

they could've just cut out other systemd components (ntp, dns management etc) and use systemd

The point of devuan is "we really do not like systemd". That's entire feature list

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#74

Post by j16sdiz »

direwolf20 wrote: post #10
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 can use systemd but it's always annoying to configure and sometimes randomly breaks and it's hard to know why. init.d scripts are no better, though. Runit is quite cool.

runit is optional on Devuan.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#75

Post by PunchyHamster »

egorfine wrote: post #19

As a passionate systemd hater I still will not go back to using older bash-based initsystems and thus devuan. I strongly believe that systemd brand is a worst thing that happened to Linux, hindering the spread and innovation in the Linux space, but at the same time I have to admit that systemd-as-pid1 is the best init system out there.

if other systems had actual good idea about how to do pid 1, they'd be used. Systemd despise its issues solved a lot of problems. There were many before but most just aimed to be slightly less shit sysv.

The problem of systemd was the fact Lennart Poettering is smartest person in the universe and why the smartest person in the universe would bother to listen to feedback of any lesser beings ?

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#76

Post by Yizahi »

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.

Systems were simpler then and demands were lower. So what if the system boots sequentially and takes two days to boot up. But try to make it parallel and faster, and the whole house of scripts falls down or becomes illegible, undiscoverable and completely unmaintainable mess.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#77

Post by propmaster »

In my job, I often release Linux services integrated with systemd and I like it more than the old init system.

My problems with systemd is the bloatware, not init related, that comes with it in modern Linux distributions.

In my perception systemd people doesn't respect the freedom of choice of the users, the right to simply switch off features they find useless, annoying or simply they don't want in their workflow for any reason. I have a personal wiki related to the preparation of the development server or PC I personally use and the large majority of the chapters are related to the systemd features I need or want to remove and often that is a pain. I would like to see the users' right to NOT use given secondary feature respected, giving them the capability to easily remove or disable them without side effects, for example, in the OS installer, to have the power to deselect features, having alternative options like "manual operation" (i.e. DNS, I should be able to disable the option opting for manual configuration using resolv.conf, just as example). Even better, the possibility to have an input configuration file with all your options so that them will be applied automatically during the installation.

IMHO, if all the distributions enforce the systemd way to do anything , we have a monopoly and monopolies are never good.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#78

Post by account42 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #56
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.

So if you don't like that, don't you still have the choice not to use software developed by Red Hat?

Embrace extend extinguish tactics, now celebrated in Linux land.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#79

Post by zkag101 »

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…

You could do the same in a less invasive manner with daemontools like forever. Not only on Linux, but on BSD as well.

But people need a corporate and worse knockoff shoved down their throats, because DJ Bernstein is independent and we cannot have independent people in software.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#80

Post by PunchyHamster »

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 time, most moved it to tmpfs finally, and that is also easier with systemd) not removed on stop. and on start it only checked whether PID existed in system, not what the PID was. So sometimes if some other app happened to get same PID as mysql on previous boot, mysql would not start on boot

* there was no checks on whether stuff app needs is mounted so some volume failing to mount could make app start with empty dir and lead to a mess.

It has problems. But it's also a massive improvement.

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