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Debian Technical Committee Votes For Systemd Over Upstart
sfcrazy writes "Bdale Garbee,chairman of the Debian Technical Committee, called for a ballot from the TC to chose the default init system. The votes are in systemd is the clear winner here. Bdale himself voted for systemd."
Who would have thought there would be consequences to spamming every article with whining and bitching?
I don't think I have much qualm about systemd as it relates to the init process. However, the people behind systemd push *hard* that text format logging is some anachronistic evil and that files on disk should just be binary. They do some pandering to the crowd by saying to run something like rsyslog alongside systemd, but that seems pretty counter to the other areas where there is an emphasis on running as few processes as possible (ambition to replace at, cron, change from running static number of getty on VC specified by inittab to on demand spawning of getty as auto detected). It's clear they regard users valuing plain text data with some disdain. There is plenty of opportunity to achieve the gains whilst concurrently providing a plain text stream to peruse natively, but they have *zero* interest in trying to pursue such paths.
This is also the brainchild of Lennart Poettering, who has had a track record of getting stuff widely into distribution critical usage path before it's ready (avahi and pulseaudio have given me lots of headaches). Also trying to get DBus into the kernel, which seems absolutely bonkers.
In general, distributions embracing this become increasingly opaque to admins. Distribution behavior flows through an increasingly complex labyrinth of crap that it approaches Microsoft level BS. I'm somewhat disheartened at the possibilities here.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The biggest thing that pushed adoption was when it absorbed udev. You can still run udev without it, but it's plastered with systemd branding and building udev without also building systemd (and then having to manually strip udev out, if you want to run it standalone) is difficult. Beyond that, Gnome 3.8 made it (almost) a hard requirement. Strictly speaking you can run Gnome without, but, as I understand, it loses almost all of the power/disk/device management.
People like it because it's obsessed with boot times (which is apparently a really important thing to people who don't actually run a real-world system, where boot times of 10 seconds vs. 5 seconds are meaningless), has a few useful features (often, subjectively, questionably implemented), and has really good PR. The problems with it include an obsession with APIs (Unix, everything is a file -> systemd, everything is an API), an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach (NIH: write their own binary-formatted logging daemon, their own cron daemon, their own implementation of dbus, ...), and a horrid misunderstanding of what an initsystem really needs to do for servers (LP: "Control groups of course are at the center of what a modern server needs to do." -- which, really, what it needs to do is serve things, not shuffle processes around various metaphorical boxes). The project is, as a result of including the kitchen sink, also extremely monolithic -- everything is stuffed in a single git repo, a single tarball, and is heavily interconnected.
Two of the primary developers (Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers) are also notoriously hard to deal with if you ever suggest they've done something incorrectly. You can find a lot of examples of this, largely to do with LP's attitude towards anything that isn't systemd, and Sievers' regular breaking of udev over the past few years.
The problems with it include an obsession with APIs
Incidentally, this also means they align more closely with Microsoft thinking than traditional Unix thinking. At some point I wish these people would just accept they want Windows and go with Windows and leave Linux alone.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
"systemd versus sysv init most visibly leads to faster boot".
That was the original marketing. systemd of course is much much more than boot.
Systemd touches every part of the OS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Upstart was bad. Systemd is worse. Both were born as boot/init systems and are unconstrained in scope.
Any program unconstrained in scope will grow into a monolithic mess.
The problem for Gnome and KDE is, that systemd is vastly superior to anything out there, and that it will help them dump loads of hard to maintain code, and give them easy access to make powerful distro-agnostic programs.
systemd provides a a common, uniform Linux plumbing system that makes life easier for all user program developers. So of course Gnome and KDE will start to take advantage of systemd, why shouldn't they?
The main problem with those who for some reason or another doesn't like systemd, is that they are incredible lazy. Instead of actually getting together to make an alternative development stack to systemd, they rant against Poettering and spew empty platitudes about "UNIX philosophy".
The most pathetic example of this anti-systemd laziness, is of course "ConsoleKit". It has now been unmaintained for +1½ years, but it is a crucial piece of infra-structure for any Desktop. But instead of either maintain it or make an alternative, anti-systemd people just rant against Gnome for no longer making it a priority to support this piece of abandonware. All rant and no work.
Actually, I would complain if the currently active log file were gzipped. It's a needless impediment to read the files. Besides, once a developer has said 'gzip' the files, then they decide 'well, I can bzip them', then later 'oh, well, .lzma is good', then 'oh, use xz'.. This is the sort of situation that systemd sets up: a treadmill where diagnostic environments must match runtime environments or else.
When Linux systems all
This language sounds like the sort of language MS would use to justify eventviewer. "All editions of *windows* will have it and that's all that matters". We've had inter-operable logging formats and facilities for decades in the *nix world, and now systemd systems will break from that strategy.
Just because you *can* do something doesn't mean it should be done. Just because this is one way at getting to more sophisticated log analysis infrastructure doesn't mean there is not a better way which would have made everyone happy.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Personally, I prefer the traditional init system from UnixV...but then I also prefer grub over grub2. I like to be able to edit my scripts easily, and not dig through several files and try to puzzle out the documentation. (In the case of grub2 my puzzling out the documentation hasn't been that successful...I frequently need several attempts to get a change that would have been simplicity itself in grub. OTOH, I've only got one machine that I can use, so any change is difficult. If I make a mistake, I may need to reinstall the whole system. I can't just look up an answer on the internet...because that requires the machine to be working.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Ignoring stallman and both of debian's BSD fans, that's pretty much Debian's userbase.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie