Slashdot Mirror

There's a list of specific issues (mostly not the vague hand-wavy complaints you're talking about) with systemd here.

Personally, I think uselessd should be getting a lot more attention in all this. (Their site is down atm, just a temporary provider issue I think).

As if the pro-systemd side was the only one with activist fans who don't understand the actual situation.

Oy... you still don't get it. For some reason those favoring systemd have been given a pass. I guess it is because a few distros have used it and people who support systemd who are not listening far outnumber those who have opposed systemd and stated logical reasons or noted issues. As a result, the burden of proof rests on anyone opposing the introduction of systemd.

Because the burden of proof rests on those opposing the introduction of systemd; it doesn't even matter if some are fanatical, because it has zero net affect.

The problem is the rational arguments showing that the status quo is better than systemd are just getting ignored and not being addressed.

ACID and that it'll be easily corrupted in a crash but never quite manage to explain how the plain text log doesn't have the same problem.

Plain text logs have risk of corruption as well, but unlike text-based logs, binary logs are fragile.

I would say it's true that the same can happen to both --- they both have risks of corruption, BUT the binary logs are much more likely to have debilitating corruption.

One byte out of place, and the entire file tends to become unusable, or systems that need to consume the logs break and can't read the rest of the logfile.

When a text-based log has a corruption issue; generally, it will mean a few lost log entries -- the write operations are fairly atomic. It doesn't matter that they aren't transactional, because text-based log storage is not as fragile as a binary file format that must be well-formed, or your log-reading tool goes KaBoomb.

With regards to logs; it only makes sense to refer to ACID compliance, when there is a relational transaction structure that must be preserved to recover the log entry. Generally with a text-based logfile, EVERYTHING that is relevant to the log entry goes to a single log line and gets written all at once, so this is really robust and hard to beat.

And the criticism from those who are against systemd is extremely important to consider. The complaints are very sound, from a technological perspective. They're also based on decades of real world experience, which just cannot be ignored.

I'm not a total fan of every design feature of everything systemd has done but gave you actually read their supporting references? I'm most of the cases boycottsystemd has rephrased events to make the systemd folks look as bad as possible in ways that would make a Fox news reporter feel proud. A good example is their comment about requiring "bug for bug" compatibility with glibc was instead a use of a certain non posix flag needed for thread safety and complaining that it is tightly tied to Linux is about as helpful as complaining that udev is tightly tied to Linux.

At any rate, I find it very telling that they don't actually mention any of their supporters.

And the criticism from those who are against systemd is extremely important to consider. The complaints are very sound, from a technological perspective. They're also based on decades of real world experience, which just cannot be ignored.

Systemd is inherently contrary to many of the core philosophies that underlie the Debian project, and that underlie UNIX and UNIX-like systems in general. Many of the criticisms of it just cannot be refuted. Bad ideas will be bad ideas, and systemd is objectively full of them.

In hindsight, it's obvious now that systemd should never have been integrated into Debian the way it has been. Debian should have indeed been forked, but with systemd going into this fork, rather than traditional Debian. Only after it had been proven as a suitable replacement should it have ever been considered for integration into mainline Debian.

Personally, I don't think the Debian project will survive. It may survive in name, but it will become weakened and irrelevant, like the XFree86 and GNOME projects have become. This truly is one of the most disturbing events to have hit such a major open source project. The worst part is that it's all so unnecessary. Debian didn't have to die as a project, and it especially did not have to die thanks to systemd of all things.

I'm in opposition of your entitlist mentality where you think the distro developers should do whatever you want them to do.

So, are you also one of the people that block the passing lane on the highway, because the sign says 55? And I'm in opposition of (stupid) knee-jerk decisions of a distro oriented more or less towards the knowledgeable crowd of users, unlike e.g. Ubuntu.

Let's have a look at the social contract (http://www.debian.org/social_contract), which was recently "upgraded":
First of all, Debian is no longer GNU/Linux. It's just "the Debian system" [1]. Debian doesn't promise to remain 100% Free software anymore, just "100% free." (Yes, yes, according to the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG), but these may change at a later point).
It's now "free works" instead of "free software" and new developments are to be published according to the DFSG, instead of unambiguously as free software.
They now "provide an integrated system of high-quality materials with no legal restrictions," instead of "an integrated system of high-quality, 100% free software [...]"

The choice should have been based on technical merit vs. political lobbying and that is what pisses me and many others off.
No, circular reasoning a-la we want gnome, because "think of the children/kittens/whatever", gnome wants systemd, so we want systemd shouldn't have been applied as the technical argument.
It's a shame that the init choice is being taken away from the users.

Since you've given me that systemd link, here's some more (I'll skip upstart):
https://wiki.debian.org/Debate...
https://wiki.debian.org/Debate...
https://wiki.debian.org/Debate...

Citation?

"I have decided to not write anything in this section, considering the aggressive tone I'm getting in return, which is all but fun. Anyway, the problems with Systemd have been debated a lot already, so it is useless to list them here again." (https://wiki.debian.org/Debate/initsystem/openrc)

http://www.debianuserforums.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=3031
https://groups.google.com/foru...
Everything else is a google search away.
Oh, and here's the vote, btw: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bi... (the actual vote starts at #6236) "Please decide, because not having systemd as default is a bug"

Some more arguments:
http://ewontfix.com/14/
http://boycottsystemd.org/

G2G, got more important matters to attend to.

I'm not going to whine and bitch about it because I am not a distro developer

That reads to me like: "I'm not going to oppose a government decision, because I'm not a politician."

How do you think they should have realistically approached this?

Simple, choose the UNIX way, let the systemd/gnome people create another downstream distro, and let their users have the choice.

[1] Why make the change, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD (or HURD) is basically out anyway, so why change to "Debian system", instead of a more conservative wording?

http://boycottsystemd.org/ has generated quite a bit of traction for UselessD, a fork that tries to put the brakes on this flaming deathcab, but its interesting to see what the big 2 are doing. Ubuntu is committed to systemd because shuttleworth wants a "unified" experience and any users that care about their dwindling illusion of free will or choice have long since jumped ship.

No Shuttleworth was forced to use systemd when Debian team decided (not by democratic vote) and announced: we will be using systemd. What helped them take this decision? Takeover of CentOS by Red Hat. That takeover gave RH more than 50% of servers market covered. If Debian would not do soo they would have big trouble in the long term. There was some hard discusion after that decision. It seems that decision was taken by less that 50% developers.

Mark biggest error was moving so many resources to development unity to piss users off. If he would work on working Desktop for the enterprise (4-5 years ago), today he would have the power to fight Lennards project. Imagine Ubuntu on enterprise desktop ignored. This could turn wrong for everyone. If Linux impresion on desktop would be broken then enterprises could look into *BSD. RH would have to listen or try to fight him.

This was a real posibility blown away by Mark. He got the basic userbase. Some companies was trying ubuntu on the desktop. If the Canonical would help develop some usable version of openoffice/libreoffice with easy case of migration from m$ office. We could see that year of Linux Desktop.

But Mark is good at presentations saying that in max. 2 years everyone will be using ubuntu. Taking the numbers from his imagination.

His second mistake (not only on his side) was ignoring the changes made to udev. Linus was screeming on them for doing soo. Gentoo folks forked udev. They asked ppl like debian devs to join and help contribute to this project. They was laughted by many other ppl for that forking.

As it turned of: The only ones who got balls to say "no to systemd by default" was Gentoo developers. This was natural because of Gentoo rule no.1 "User decides what he wants". Many distro clones did adapt. They decided systemd was supreme or was forced by alienation.

IMHO Linux migh be facing separation in not so long future. This might be the end of Linux aswell because of split energy and scarying out buisneses what are using Linux today. The *BSD might have its 5 minutes.
The real way to fight back truely is contributed uselessd and backedup by Gentoo hackers and Debian team (its in their interest!). I believe that Gento developers will see this. They sleepted oportunity to work with Debian ealier (before uselessd)

http://boycottsystemd.org/ has generated quite a bit of traction for UselessD, a fork that tries to put the brakes on this flaming deathcab, but its interesting to see what the big 2 are doing. Ubuntu is committed to systemd because shuttleworth wants a "unified" experience and any users that care about their dwindling illusion of free will or choice have long since jumped ship. Pottering works at RedHat so theyve decided to hedge their bets that the server world, which is their bread and butter, is honestly interested in a binary logging monolithic pid0 that has udev and dbus as forced dependencies. user switching and networkmanager are fucking useless to me.

Leonard wont address this fact, but it stands and stands well. RC init was fine. SunRPC was fine. syslog was fine and consoles werent broken to begin with. Whining about mean developers in linux misses the point. you're redesigning something for the sake of redesign and its being done against the wishes of an ethos, the unix ethos, that has served well to maintain some of the most powerful computing systems in the world. There will be a pushback when you have the audacity to imply your linux redesign is a "choice" after a plurality of distributions adopt it.

A fairly comprehensive list of perceived problems can be found here.

It's a software component that starts daemons.

No it's not. Go read this.

He also won't fix a critical bug, and here's a dozen more reasons to hate this crapware.
Lennart, pack your things and go, or start playing nice finally!

If that's what you hear, then you're a fucking idiot.

Instead of wallowing in your own ignorance, what if you do something productive, like learning all about the many things that are wrong and broken with systemd?

...the init process needs to be really minimalistic and offload everything else with a simple and well documented (better: obvious) interface. "systemd" should have been named "borgd" a long time ago and by now it has gone completely wild assimilating a lot of things it thinks a problem needs to be solved. http://boycottsystemd.org/ summarizes the issues very well.

Why is systemd bad?

The issues posed by adopting systemd to various distros are listed on the site: Boycott systemd.

Spread it around so people know ...

Mod this up!

Much gnashing of teeth will ensue for years to come. A la emacs vs vim, kde vs gnome, gnome 3 vs gnome 2, etc ad nausem

In all those other debates, they were pretty evenly matched with both being sensible options. The only exception in your list is GNOME 3 which was a disaster. I don't know much about it, but this is interesting: http://boycottsystemd.org/

I bet they'll have to support RHEL6 for many and many years as a lot of companies won't upgrade to RHEL7.

http://boycottsystemd.org/

Systemd is the new future toolbox for maintaining and running Linux: All major enterprise Linux distros are using or are about to use systemd. Sure, a few companies will delay their transition to systemd if they have a lot of custom stuff they need to change, but systemd just have so many new awesome features that most will embrace it with joy; systemd simply means faster and better maintenance, and being able to pack more services in each hardware unit.

Those who dislike systemd are just a tiny but vocal minority; they have also spend the last couple of years smearing named open source developers like Lennart Poettering and trash-talking systemd, instead of developing an alternative to systemd. As a group they accept how the most extreme voices against systemd are unopposed, meaning that all the swivel eyed loonies with their paranoid ranting have become spokespersons for them, resulting in that nobody wants to work with them. So not only are the systemd detractors a small group, but they alienate most of the potential developers they could have had.

The end result is that almost nobody works on alternatives to systemd. Critical software like "ConsoleKit" is bit-rotting, nobody tries to help upstream projects supporting anything else but logind, despite that eg. Gnome developers have warned about this for years.

Instead of helping KDE and Gnome supporting non-systemd systems, the systemd detractors just rant on how NSA/The Greys/Poettering are controlling Gnome and KDE, and that everybody should boycot them and use CDE instead.

Like it or not, systemd will be in any Linux distro of importance in the future. Sysvinit (and X) are on life support and will be killed off at first opportunity people get. Even OpenBSD are starting to clone certain parts of systemd, and there is no doubt that all BSD's will have their init-system upgraded to a modern version inspired/cloned from systemd in the upcoming years. It is simply that good.

Systemd is not "that good." As an opponent myself, I am an admin, not a developer. And as an admin, I fail to see what was wrong with the BSD Init system. It works. It's simple. It's good.

And as far as Mr. Poettering goes, I much prefer to trash talk his work. Attacking him, no matter what you may think of him, doesn't get the point across.

I bet they'll have to support RHEL6 for many and many years as a lot of companies won't upgrade to RHEL7.

http://boycottsystemd.org/

Systemd is the new future toolbox for maintaining and running Linux: All major enterprise Linux distros are using or are about to use systemd. Sure, a few companies will delay their transition to systemd if they have a lot of custom stuff they need to change, but systemd just have so many new awesome features that most will embrace it with joy; systemd simply means faster and better maintenance, and being able to pack more services in each hardware unit.

Those who dislike systemd are just a tiny but vocal minority; they have also spend the last couple of years smearing named open source developers like Lennart Poettering and trash-talking systemd, instead of developing an alternative to systemd. As a group they accept how the most extreme voices against systemd are unopposed, meaning that all the swivel eyed loonies with their paranoid ranting have become spokespersons for them, resulting in that nobody wants to work with them. So not only are the systemd detractors a small group, but they alienate most of the potential developers they could have had.

The end result is that almost nobody works on alternatives to systemd. Critical software like "ConsoleKit" is bit-rotting, nobody tries to help upstream projects supporting anything else but logind, despite that eg. Gnome developers have warned about this for years.

Instead of helping KDE and Gnome supporting non-systemd systems, the systemd detractors just rant on how NSA/The Greys/Poettering are controlling Gnome and KDE, and that everybody should boycot them and use CDE instead.

Like it or not, systemd will be in any Linux distro of importance in the future. Sysvinit (and X) are on life support and will be killed off at first opportunity people get. Even OpenBSD are starting to clone certain parts of systemd, and there is no doubt that all BSD's will have their init-system upgraded to a modern version inspired/cloned from systemd in the upcoming years. It is simply that good.

I bet they'll have to support RHEL6 for many and many years as a lot of companies won't upgrade to RHEL7.

http://boycottsystemd.org/