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1) Systemd has a much slower shutdown, which means a reboot takes much longer. 2) Debian can be rebooted in 30 seconds. So even if boot was speeded up, it is a negligible advantage, and hardly justifies such a radical change.

Incorrect. Debian shutdown/reboot can take any amount of time, up to +inf. For example, this beautiful initscript: http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit... can hang indefinitely (see line 92) and stop the reboot process forever. It's not theoretical either, I happened to go at 4am to our datacenter to power-cycle a server because of this bug.

Meanwhile, systemd can actually reliably kill services using cgroups to track all of the services' processes.

Because for once APK is honestly wrong. https://lists.debian.org/debia...

In addition, this update also disables SSLv3.

Dated Sat, 18 Oct 2014 19:31:55 +0200, which is almost two weeks ago, which is before yesterday.

Wrong. Redhat's first release was October 1994. RPM didn't come along until 1997. Debian's first release was August 1993. Their history doesn't indicate the date that the first release of dpkg was unleashed, but it was prior to 1.1, which was in June 1996. apt is a more recent addition, dselect was the package management tool of choice prior to that, and was around since 0.93R6 in November 1995.
https://www.debian.org/doc/man...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

I've been a Debian user since sometime in 1996, was a RH user from 3.0.3 until around the 6.X days, and was a Slackware user before that (back in the pre-kernel 1.0 days when a distro was 50+ floppies for a full install)

Users are going for systemd and liking it https://qa.debian.org/popcon-g... Notice how the rush starts after gnome (in debian) drops the hard dependency on systemd, that's when systemd-shim appears, and how systemd-shim users are declining and also not voting for the package.

debootstrap. All you need is a disk that is mounted, and access to a repository.

https://wiki.debian.org/Deboot...

The packages it installs are just the core debian console-only base system. Nothing super fancy. It can consume upwards of 300mb of disk however-- but when you absolutely NEED to get $FOO running, because busybox does not have it compiled in, or you need some special service to start, the repository access is very handy.

Again, because it installs into a user-specified directory, it is a ready made chroot ready to be jumped into. I have a debian chroot on my consumer grade wifi router, which I use for all kinds of fun things. It sits alongside openwrt without issue, and keeps the flash clean from extraneous stuff. It sits on the small USB stick I have stuck in it.

The real point I was making though, was that debian was a REFERENCE DISTRO.

It does NOT fall into the "Desktop" or "Server" category. It is "Reference". Debian is neither a really good desktop (older, more mature packages, which means spottier driver support), nor a really good server. What it is, is a good reference platform from which to BUILD a specialized distro.

Many systems are based on debian. Decisions which impact debian will impact those other downstream distros. Not all of which will be too pleased with including systemd.

Debian has its niche. Much like the argument about vi and emacs, the init vs systemd argument will not go away. That's why reference distros like debian should support both without favoritism. Any downstream distros that use them as the reference can pick as their userbase deems appropriate.

The "Remove the fragmentation!" rally cry fails to capture that "homogeneity is not always good" and is in fact, the antithesis of "choice."

Once again you demonstrate your superior reading skilz by confusing Electricity Likes Me with Eunuchswear. Maybe you only read as far as the first letter?

You even misread Electricity's comment as a claim that systemd was installed by default, when he was clearly telling you about the default behaviour of systemd on Debian if it was installed.

The existence of a package page does not make it a package installed by default.

Nobody ever said it was. The fact that a package is not in the default list does not make it impossible to install.

It is perfectly possible to install systemd on Debian Wheezy. It is one of the packages in the standard repositories. The fact that you don't have it on your system tells us nothing about whether Electricity has it on his system. Maybe you don't have Frozen Bubble installed on your system. Does that mean that Frozen Bubble is not part of Debian Weezy? https://packages.debian.org/wheezy/frozen-bubble.

The comparison with the SystemD version of the file is invalid because the complexity has just been shifted elsewhere. In the init version, the complexity is in the script. In the SystemD version, it's in a monolithic binary running as PID 1.

Yes, it's written ONCE, thoroughly audited and tested on variety of systems.

Which is better is not clear just from looking at the files.

Look at http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit... - can you spot a fatal flaw in this file?

Jessie has already moved over to it and the shim gone.

Untrue. The shim is still there.
https://packages.debian.org/jessie/systemd-shim

I asked you what Debian you were using that has these two programs since it's not in 5-7 (even the unstable branch) and you point me to a repo page. Thanks for backing my point about false claims.

Huh?

https://packages.debian.org/wheezy/systemd

I personally ran into tons of problems with SysV scripts. They are not theoretical. One of them forced me to go into our data center at night to power-cycle a machine: http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit... (can you find it?)

And yes, I really do hate the old "let's just hack a bash script approach" or "'sleep 10' solves this race" kinds of admins. And mostly because I have to make their shit run on large-scale clusters that experience all kinds of weird failure modes.

Rumor is voting is supposed to end by October 30th. Here's the main thread so you can check for yourself.

Many scripts directly read configuration files, create lists of filenames and deal with various environment variables. Those are all input. Also there are lots of scripts which do not call just one "startup program" but acquire data from tens of helper processes. For an example, see the bind9 script, which was featured in another comment in this discussion. I have also seen weird "Invalid argument" breakage when the interface of one of those accessories changes slightly.

Well good news, this is the default, at least on Debian. In fact Debian doesn't even store journalctl logs, it fowards then straight through to rsyslog.

Really now? What Debian are you running with systemd and journald? We run thousands of machines on Debian 5-7 and I have yet to use either, see either, or configure either. I have init, and I have a choice of rsyslog or syslog-ng, that's it.

Reading this whole post, I see a whole lot of people fabricating information trying to claim that anyone not for systemd is some type of [ad hominem], I see lots of appeal to authority arguments for systemd, I don't see much honesty when it comes to systemd which is very troublesome.

Fabricating info? Then I guess this doesn't exist?

There are Debian packages for systemd-init. There are Ubuntu packages.

So we return to my original opinion...

Here is a graph for you https://qa.debian.org/popcon-g...

Oh yeah, good call, it looks like Debian is having some kind of vote to see if they should support Init in addition to SystemD. To “preserve the freedom of choice for init systems.” Here is the original post.

People that are older, smarter, and wiser than YOU realize that the basic concept of systemd is just fucked.

Yeah, sure. Here's your Social Security check grampa, go and watch Fox news.

While we (the new and stupid generation) actually start designing software that is built on a _reliable_ base instead of cobbled up shitmobile that are classic initscripts. Seriously, when shit scripts like this: http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit... are shipped in a major Linux distribution - you can't hope to build something that works on a large scale with them.

Lukas from ownCloud here (the one mentioned in that article). I have to say, that this quickly escalated in a way that I did certainly not intend to. However, I'd like to clarify one thing.

The article states "for which no fixes have been backported". With that I meant to refer to the Ubuntu packages and not Version 5 or 6. We still support ownCloud 5 for security patches and critical bugfixes and ownCloud 6 for bugfixes and security patches. This might have been unclear.

I sent this request to Ubuntu because we're very much concerned about our users. While some of us might know that using the "Universe" repository is not a that great idea for internet facing software, most people don't. Furthermore, I don't believe it's the responsibility of the developer to update packages in every single distribution out there. Especially with distributions such as Ubuntu you have to follow quite complex processes such as SRU which consumes a lot of time.
Additionally, some people in the comments seem to claim that "one developer of ownCloud is noted as maintainer for the Debian package". This entry is a legacy entry and as you can see in the changelog at http://metadata.ftp-master.deb... Thomas did last modify the packages at 11 Oct 2012.

We're always recommending to our users to use one of the supported installation methods such as owncloud.org/install where we even provide our own repositories for most distributions.

(Disclaimer: Opinions expressed in this post are solely my own and do not necessarily also express the views of the ownCloud project or my employer)

Perhaps we could make a comparison with the upstream source of Ubuntu? Let me see...
Oh NOES right on the Debian wiki it says that Unstable might have horrible bugs! And if you run it on a server you are insane!
And... it says Debian's security team only covers Stable. Maybe this is why the Ubuntu forums got hacked and every user account, password and email address was stolen?
https://wiki.debian.org/Debian...

Emacs is neatly packaged so you can install only the things you like, just as debian does for python, ruby, and lots other environments (emacs is more like them than a mere editor).

Because, I repeat, it is not cancer.

Another way would be to show them existing free software like Canonical "summit", which was used for last Debconf 14 in Portland. It's available from here:

http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit...

There's also Penta, but it's quite old, and maybe summit is better.

So, if that non-profit thinks SaaS solutions aren't good, tell them they are right. But also tell them that starting from scratch is silly (to say it nicely) when there's already nice free software they can contribute to (for these features that they think nobody has...).

If systemd is going to be the default init system on steroids, where will that leave the non-Linux ports of Debian, which prides itself in being THE "universal operating sytem" (go ahead Google for the phrase, first hit is Debian)? Insisting on hard dependency on systemd is going to creat problems for Debian Hurd and kFreeBSD, unless systemd has already been ported to those systems? https://www.debian.org/ports/h... http://www.debian.org/ports/kf...

If systemd is going to be the default init system on steroids, where will that leave the non-Linux ports of Debian, which prides itself in being THE "universal operating sytem" (go ahead Google for the phrase, first hit is Debian)? Insisting on hard dependency on systemd is going to creat problems for Debian Hurd and kFreeBSD, unless systemd has already been ported to those systems? https://www.debian.org/ports/h... http://www.debian.org/ports/kf...

You ARE confused. Please do apt-get source sysvinit and point me to a patch that addresses a bug in the upstream code (hint, there isn't one).

An RFE is in no sense a bug.

What the patches DO show is startpar being added in. That is, the ability for the init to happen in parallel.

But note, I don't advocate staying with the old unimproved sysvinit forever, just until a truly superior solution that doesn't try to own the world is ready to go.

Have a look at the SysVinit changelog. There have been 53 commits since 2.88 was released years ago. Sure some of them are Debian specific, some are startpar, but others are not.
http://metadata.ftp-master.deb...

Dismissing RFE's as "not bugs" may mean dismissing request for making SysVinit work with other programs or take advantage of important new features. Thinking that init can live in its own little time bubble while the rest of the system evolves is wrong.

I was really unhappy with Debian's move to systemd, and the fact that once systemd is running as one's init system through a general upgrade, one cannot even go back to sysvinit..

Having heard that Slackware was resistant to systemd, I installed the latest version of Slackware on a netbook I have lying around, and while it's a fine project that clearly has its fans, it seems to require a lot of retraining for someone coming from Debian. I'd love to be able to stay on the venerable old Linux distro I have so many years of experience in.

I predict that use of systemd will result in too many 'release critical' bugs, and that future releases will be delayed very badly because of this.

I was really unhappy with Debian's move to systemd, and the fact that once systemd is running as one's init system through a general upgrade, one cannot even go back to sysvinit..

Having heard that Slackware was resistant to systemd, I installed the latest version of Slackware on a netbook I have lying around, and while it's a fine project that clearly has its fans, it seems to require a lot of retraining for someone coming from Debian. I'd love to be able to stay on the venerable old Linux distro I have so many years of experience in.

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?

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?

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?

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?

Of course, this is what it's all boiling down to, this group of people are forced to switch.

Yes that's true, but most Linux users won't even notice.

But this group of people is the one going to be laughing when SHTF with systemd and consorts, and certainly, at some point we won't give a fuck, but it's still a hassle and it's the community at large that suffers due to the segregation. Eventually, this "vocal minority" as some people call this group, is the one who's got the brains, apparently.

You say that but Arch, Core, Fedora, Mageia and openSUSE have been using it for years and RHEL recently did it's release as well, all the fear-mongering has amounted to pretty much zero of anything. Also FWIW here is the summary debate page for Debian's adoption of systemd and there's a bunch of linked documentation there as well.

I have not tested but it looks like you can swap it out for something else on at least Debian: https://packages.debian.org/je... [debian.org]

The problem is likely the same as on gentoo. Sure you don't have to install systemd, but a shit tonne of stuff will depend on it, or have dependencies that depend on it. I imagine the situation will be far worse on binary based distros as they tend to pull in a shit tonne of libraries and sometimes actual programs because of some minor but tightly coupled feature that didn't warrant a patch or a -non-<whatever> version. As I said in a prior post, on gentoo I had to straight up blacklist the systemd package and rely on portage failing because telling everything not to compile with systemd support isn't enough!

Slackware ditched gnome because it became too big of a pain to include it without including systemd.

The whole thing is just very anti-linux imo.

The problem imo is specifically that it's not just an init system. It's morphing into it's own thing that wants to take over all routine system behaviour, and the attitude of the devs is not encouraging (too lazy to find the link, but an oft quoted comment regarding log file corruption illustrates this quite well).

You say that as if it's a bad thing that stuff can be made to work well together if it's developed together.

Linux (at least in my opinion) is all about choice. Don't like the way something works, use something else or write your own. Systemd is becoming a huge chunk that can't easily be swapped out for something else. I'm really against that.

I have not tested but it looks like you can swap it out for something else on at least Debian:
https://packages.debian.org/je...

And importance is relative. If you just want a functioning system, I agree that none of this is really that important and I'd probably just use ubuntu or mint or hell just windows or mac. I use gentoo specifically because I like my system "just so". Most people probably fall somewhere in between these points, with some past where they care about systemd and some not. I think this is perfectly healthy. If no one cared about init systems or boot loaders, no one would be developing them!

Indeed.

Unless your CGI script happens to run zgrep or any of the other things that force bash use for no obvious reason.

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=762915, apparently just fixed.

Very unlikely. Most CGI engines have built-in support for gzip compression, since it could be used for compression/decompression of the content.

Also, most "CGI" nowadays is only "CGI" by the name. Zend/PHP, RoR, mod_perl - are all either FastCGI or Apache plugins, and do not use the environment to pass information around.

Squeeze was the first version to default to dash.

I'm pretty sure I was asked when upgrading to Squeeze if I wanted to make it the default, but the question may not have been a high-priority one so debconf could have been configured to skip it.

The following O.Ses. doesn't use bash for /bin/sh, system() and popen() by default and are a lot safer than the other Linux distros against exploitation of Shellshock: Debian, Ubuntu.

Unless your CGI script happens to run zgrep or any of the other things that force bash use for no obvious reason.

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=762915, apparently just fixed.

Lack of systemd integration was the point Debian use to decide witch back from XFCE to Gnome instead of MATE:

https://anonscm.debian.org/cgi...

"Systemd/etc integration: Xfce, Mate, etc are stuck paying catch-up to
ongoing changes in this area. There will be time to hopefully iron these
issues out during the freeze once the tech stack stops changing out from
under them, so this is not a complete blocker for those desktops, but
going by the current status, Gnome is ahead."

I was very surprised by that point that I was not aware of before. I still think that MATE bring a better usable desktop as of the today state of jessie.

Thats a fine criticism to make ("its not stable enough-- run it thru Ubuntu / Fedora / whatever for more cycles"), and its not where my issue lies.

My issue lies when people who are supposedly system administrators-- whom one would hope knew their IT fundamentals-- start raising objections that make no actual sense, like the problem with a binary format simply because its a binary format. Thats not a valid objection: all formats are binary formats, and all of them were at one point new. You can say "it needs more testing" (as you did), but at some point it will be tested, and at that point continuing to object on the grounds that its binary as if that fact somehow makes it less reliable begins to reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of how computers and data work.

What's really being expressed here is "the tools and conventions I use are being changed, and thats scary-- therefore it must be bad." Change CAN be bad, and its never much fun, but it can often be beneficial. I wonder if you compared a simple filesystem like FAT to one with journalling and checksumming like ZFS, if you might be able to complain about the arcane data structures and metadata and checksums used by ZFS compared to the simple FAT. But noone sane would argue that FAT is more reliable or more desirable for production systems, and its not a problem: the filesystem is well documented and has multiple well vetted OSS implementations, so it doesnt much matter that your Mac or Windows box wont be able to read it.

Its interesting that in the Debian bug where one of the massive discussions happened, "binary log" (or logs, or logging, etc) only occurs in 2 people's posts (and in one quote)-- this in a thread with some ~8000 comments (try ctrl-f'ing if yourself-- "binary L"). I wonder if thats because the devs there understand that whatever issues systemD has, the "binaryness" of its logs just isnt one.

Fixed in wheezy (v7), but not squeeze (v6). Status: https://security-tracker.debia...

Linky

I don't have an answer for you, but can direct you to the latest thread on the topic — On August 8, a message was posted to debian-devel@lists.debian.org titled Reverting to GNOME for jessie's default desktop; the thread had 174 messages. Josselin Mouette made a specific question that goes along your question, but I'm sure you will find more.

I don't have an answer for you, but can direct you to the latest thread on the topic — On August 8, a message was posted to debian-devel@lists.debian.org titled Reverting to GNOME for jessie's default desktop; the thread had 174 messages. Josselin Mouette made a specific question that goes along your question, but I'm sure you will find more.

Alexander P. Kowolski, the HOSTS file troll. Just google "apk hosts file troll."

One result, from the Debian mailing lists

Sometimes referred to as the APK approach (a famous troll) who devoted his life to promoting the hosts file as a cure for everything - more than just a filter - it's a firewall - it's an antivirus - it stops spyware, fixes your car, and makes you look thin! Last I heard *his* hosts files were around the 12MB mark! Hosts files work fine I guess (they certainly keep you busy!) - though they lack the fine grain control (wildcards, selected fileextensions, regular expressions) of AdBlock Plus, protection against cross-site scripting, element hiding, the ability to block flash and java elements - and the reporting ability. And it's easy to write new extensions for it. You could probably import the basis of a host block list from an AdBlock subscription. NoScript combined with AdBlock (they're both in the repositories) allow you to remove the mouse-overs and the embedded (javascript written) ads as well. Host files will only remove some ads, and they can't do squat about floating divs or javascript document writes.

His "solution" is absurd in an era when even cheap laptops have quad cores and oddles of ram to run whatever you want, including browser extensions. And yet, pointing out that he has one heck of a reputation as the "HOSTS file troll" or that his "solution" is so '90s gets the same response. With me, of course, he takes it to an entirely different (and lower) level. Kind of sad, really.

but I have to say: "Try A Different Distro"
http://www.debian.org/CD

This is actually really interesting technical problem that the Tor and Debian people have spent some time working on. In practice, with most compilers today, if you compile a program twice you get different binaries. There are a variety of reasons for this, from embedded time stamps to non-deterministic shared library reference ordering to embedding the host name of the build machine.

Here's the Debian project's wiki page on the problem that goes into much more detail:
https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds

https://packages.debian.org/un...

You can easily get it for debian and the code is out there for compiling.

[Unit]
Description=BIND Domain Name Server
Documentation=man:named(8)
After=network.target
[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/named -f -u bind
ExecReload=/usr/sbin/rndc reload
ExecStop=/usr/sbin/rndc stop
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

That's it. It's so short that I can cut&paste it here and it _also_ correctly detects network going up, can be started in parallel, can't hang indefinitely during the shutdown and so on.

Yes, the old SysV init of hordes of scripts running in series was broken - especially for large-scale systems that have to do a lot of things during startup.

But systemd is just plain FUCKED UP. Read the dependencies [debian.org] .

Why the fuck does the startup process have to depend on the IPv6 kernel module? The other dependencies are no better.

systemd handles dhcp functionality, too. With IPv6 adoption growing, surely it makes sense to support it.

DHCP? WHY?!? Who thought it was a "good idea" to shove DHCP into init functionality? Holy Fuckload of Useless BLOAT, BATMAN! What if you're on a minimal machine without network connections?

And DBUS? WHAT THEY FLYING FUCK?!?!

It makes NO SENSE whatsoever to put those dependencies into an init process and the kernel itself. Holy shit that is STUPID. When networking protocols changed over the years, that had NO IMPACT on SysV init design and O&M. Because SysV init could handle anything that could be fit into its framework. The only real problems it has are that it's unwieldy and it doesn't scale. And yes, those are huge problems on large-scale systems, and they need to be addressed.

But to do it by making critical portions of the OS itself dependent upon DHCP? DBUS?

Nevermind the INCOMPETENT implementation. How bad do you have to be to fuck up logging?

And we're supposed to be glad that entire Linux systems are dependent upon a new init process that can't even log reliably?

There is *still* no alternative to keyscript in crypttab. Upgrading to systemd trashes a system that relies on smartcards or other hardware to obtain key material for mounting encrypted disks. I wouldn't be this upset, normally - you can imagine that this is just a normal teething problem - except I read through this thread where Lennart seems to doubt the very validity of the entire use-case... I had briefly contemplated seeing if I could contribute to this bug, but the insistence that we should all write C programs (unless you want your initrd to carry python or perl interpreters and all that baggage), for every possible permutation of every key delivery system devisable by admin-kind, made me give up and revert to sysvinit instead.

Yes, the old SysV init of hordes of scripts running in series was broken - especially for large-scale systems that have to do a lot of things during startup.

But systemd is just plain FUCKED UP. Read the dependencies [debian.org] .

Why the fuck does the startup process have to depend on the IPv6 kernel module? The other dependencies are no better.

systemd handles dhcp functionality, too. With IPv6 adoption growing, surely it makes sense to support it.

Yes, the old SysV init of hordes of scripts running in series was broken - especially for large-scale systems that have to do a lot of things during startup.

But systemd is just plain FUCKED UP. Read the dependencies.

Why the fuck does the startup process have to depend on the IPv6 kernel module? The other dependencies are no better.