Slashdot Mirror
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."
And now there's no reason to start!
the default init system for Linux architectures in jessie
That's because upstart was BETA software from Canonical.
It looks like this article was posted exactly one hour after the previous one, which was posted exactly one hour after the one before. I guess the (automatically scheduled) beatings will continue until morale improves.
Having been a well behaved, not overly vocal member of the slashdot community for many years (10? more?), today, I found myself banned by ip. and my Karma (which has always been neutral) reduced to "terrible".
I had posted 10 times over the last 48 hrs, in support of the slashdot boycott. Most sensible debate, some houmour.
You know once the powers that be need to silence those who gently disapprove, that it's all gone terribly wrong, and those pushing for change that damages everyone are too weak to even make a sensible argument.
Oh Dear.
It's a shame to see a bunch of Canonical shills on the Debian Technical Committee though. This should have been strictly between OpenRC and systemd, but the Canonical shills were trying to push Upstart even though it's a buggy piece of shit that is inferior to systemd in every way.
...here.
Finding God in a Dog
I didn't really know much about systemd being a ubuntu user, but found this giving more background on the story: https://wiki.debian.org/Debate.... The wiki does a good job detailing the technologies. Given the information, the choice of systemd is interesting.
Obviously, there's been a big push across the board by many various distros, but what are the real benefits of systemd? Is it better for average end-users (Easier? Faster?) or those more technically inclined (more stable, uses less resources, more configurable)? Or is this simply a case of it just being non-Canonical?
Who would have thought there would be consequences to spamming every article with whining and bitching?
The Individual Midnight Thread - Farewell
I'm moving with all the great community of smart people and old-timers to http://www.altslashdot.org/ [altslashdot.org] (server will be up & running in few hours).
See you all great guys there!
We are also on IRC ##altslashdot on freenode
GBUWLA, or BSD a productivity
Slashdot is officially dead. Beta killed it. Goodbye Slashdot.
Justice is served. Keep up the bans and let's get rid of the deadwood.
I fully support the rights of a bar to throw out the belligerently drunk - that's not censorship, it's called caring for your customers. None of us are here to read moronic posts about website style changes. We are here to read insightful commentary on technical stories and if you can't handle that, you do not and should not belong.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Or, the CLAs are the Slashdot Beta of OSS Communities?
I do not know, just keeping the flame alive... ;-)
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
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.
Oh, you'll still think FUCK BETA is off topic? How quaint.
you like the Timothy auto feed too, huh?
Enjoy your lovely new brilliantly designed and targeted tech news website when it arrives!
(and they they made them turn against each other...those good ol propaganda tactics still work a treat, wake up someone's selling you!)
Ubuntu: The distro for people not clever enough to install something more serious, and don't know that Mint is a far better choice for such people. Whenever I encounter someone who endorses Ubuntu, I downgrade their geek score down to that of a Windows 8 fan.
I admit that the idiotic ebonified pseudo-mult-culti-faggy name "Ubuntu" (sounds like the name of Idi Amin's dog, "sit Ubuntu, sit") was the cause of my initial distaste, but since the list good of reasons to hate Ubuntu has grown long. As a longtime Debian lover (have version 2.0 install media right here), the less Debian becomes like Ubuntu the better!
You can have my SIG when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
As a current Debian(testing,Jessie) user this strikes me as a bad choice. However I am thankful that there other sane distros not drinking Lennart Poettering's brain cell killing kool-aid. So I say hail o/ to the Linux Distros not selling their souls, Slackware, Gentoo , Ubuntu thank you guys for not being retards and seeing the suckyness of systemd.
Seems I will have to migrate off Debian pretty soon. It was a good year I had with Debian but with this it seems Debian as chosen to be a follower, a kool aid drinker and a also ran instead of being unique. Thank you Lennart for killing off another distro for me to love.
---- GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Ubuntu used to be good before they destroyed themselves around 2011.
Mint is an Ubuntu fork after all...
To get you past redirects to beta, easily http://games.slashdot.org/comm...
No, it is loathed by a small, vocal, percentage of system administrators, who have very little in the way of technical arguments at their disposal. This vote may be considered evidence in that respect.
There is very little to recommend init scripts. I dismiss arguments that they are any easier for any average mortal to deal with than any other piece of code, and there is very little justification for wasting CPU time on a non-interactive process. Additionally, this will merely be a default -- those who want slow boots, or think cgroups are evil, can go ahead and install systemv-init and purge systemd. Or, since systemd, d-bus, pulseaudio, and wayland are evidently the future of Linux, the malcontents can install BSD -- it comes with a free chip for your other shoulder.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Their recent updates have broken udev so badly, that Gentoo decided to fork udev to retain the old design. Debian should pay attention.
Nature has gotten pretty good at taking care of blatant mistakes. This is especially true in the software world.
Look at XFree86. They fucked up big-time, and now the project is basically dead. Almost everybody has abandoned it, never to return.
Look at GNOME 3. They fucked up big-time, and now the project is basically dead. Almost everybody has abandoned it, never to return.
Look at Windows 8. They fucked up big-time, and now Windows is sliding further into irrelevancy. People and companies are moving to OS X, Android, iOS and Linux, never to return to Windows.
Look at Firefox 4+. They fucked up big-time, and now the project is dying. Users are fleeing it in droves, never to return.
Look at Slashdot Beta. They fucked up big-time, and now the community is dying. People are leaving, or will be leaving, permanently, never to return.
Maybe Debian is next. They've made a bad decision, and it's likely that their importance will diminish, much like has happened to Fedora and other Linux distros that have made really stupid choices. People will move to Ubuntu, or even to the BSDs, never to return to Debian.
Yyyeah, no, I heard a lot of hate for it, but Oh god, upstart is a disaster. It's a dependency-based system that doesn't do anything with its dependencies! Systemd's a little bit terrifying, but it actually does the job it sets out to do, while every time I sit down with upstart I wish I was just using basic sysV+LSB init.
I've been using all my banked karma to vote down the cut & paste protest messages about beta.
I've been marking each and every one of them as "Off-topic" (well until my karma ran out). I assume that after a certain threshold of negative posts there are built-in repercussions under the system.
I know sober reflection isn't popular when discussing the site redesign but there you go.
What Mint really needs to get widespread adoption is a better story around major release updates. They say something like, "better just save your user data, reinstall the system from scratch, and restore your data...", or "uhh you can try to update but we don't promise it'll work..."
Not good answers. If they fix that, Ill switch to Mint tomorrow.
This is the first I've heard of OpenRC, but it sounds like the ideal compromise to improve the init system while remaining compatible with it and not consuming unrelated projects into it.
https://wiki.debian.org/Debate/initsystem/openrc
I know things have been somewhat hectic around here these past few days, what with the negative response from the community to the beta, and the extensive down-modding we've seen as a result of the outrage. Mis-moderations do happen now and then, of course, but it seems to be particularly bad lately. Perfectly good comments, making perfectly valid and correct points, and corresponding perfectly to the topic of discussion, are modded down without any obvious reason why.
The GP is right. In this case, it just so happens that the Slashdot beta website is in fact a very good example of what can happen to a software project that makes bad decisions that prove to be harmful to the users. We can even witness the inherent truth to this statement within the comments of this very thread of discussion! The GP's comment deserves a +5, Insightful mod, not -1. If it applies to Slashdot and the other projects mentioned, it applies to Debian, as well.
I really hope that these obvious mis-moderations come to an end soon enough. The level of censorship here is edging toward that we see at Reddit or Hacker News. That kind of overt censorship is one of the main reasons why so many people come to Slashdot, rather than those sites. The discussion here is much more robust and open to original thought, whereas such things are shunned and punished at Reddit and Hacker News. If the awful beta website doesn't drive people away, then the modding-down of perfectly good comments likely will.
You do know your pretty flagrant racism makes your opinions automatically much less sound, right?
Upstart was unnecessary in Ubuntu. Systemd is not necessary in Fedora or Debian.
There are other ways to get fast boots, without create another monolithic do-everything daemon with spaghetti dependencies.
Basic software engineering principles (and Unix principles), should tell you that do-everything daemons, like upstart, systemd, hald are bad ideas.
With such complex, unmodular core Linux systems, Linux based OS's will grow increasingly more unstable and insecure.
Also, systemd and upstart make Linux much less suitable for embedded systems.
The choices, I guess, are:
Fork the pre-systemd Debian. ... Android.
Start fresh, perhaps even starting with the simple event based init system from the most popular Linux distribution in the world
This is good because it will get systemd onto even more systems, which will hopefully be a forcing function for improving it so that it's more usable.
The introduction of systemd into my distros of choice (I was a heavy Arch Linux user until this year, when I switched back to Fedora after a ~8 year absence) has caused me more problems that any other single change to any part of the Linux operating system in my history of its usage (and I've been using Linux since 1994).
I'm at the point in my life where I just want things to work; and I found that systemd has in many places not worked well. I wholly believe that the problems are generally due to the implementation of the individual services, and not bugs in systemd itself, although I suspect that the 90 degree turn taken by systemd and its associated complexity are the genesis of the problems in the individual services themselves.
In particular, I've found that systemd on Fedora cannot properly start up an NFS server. I have a post-start up script that I run manually to start NFS because no matter what I do, it does not seem possible to force systemd to start all of the requisite NFS services. systemds tools for figuring out what could be going wrong are, I am sure, complete, but very impenetrable to a person who wants to understand the minimum necessary to fix a problem.
Additionally, it seems to be easy to break systemd's boot scripts in a way that prevent systemd from being able to boot the system (it's happened to me over and over again through what seemd like innocuous user actions), and I have never successfully gotten systemd to boot into its recovery shell. I can get to the recovery shell but I can never type anything into it, it seems like there's something borked with the way it handles keyboard input somehow.
In summary, systemd is much less mature than init ever was, which, combined with its tendency to reimplement everything and thus de-evolve much of what used-to-work into no-longer-works-easily, has resulted in whole system failures at a rate that I have never, ever experienced before under Linux.
All that being said, it's pretty clear that lots of Linux distro maintainers are more excited by the few advancements that systemd makes over the old init system, than they are put off by the lack of maturity and quality of systemd; therefore, systemd is an inevitability, and I'm glad that debian is taking it now, because it will mean even more developer effort towards fixing its problems.
In short: more pain for other people, making them more likely to fix my problems for me. So I'm happy that debian is doing this to their users, for my benefit.
Fuck you.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
honestly, i would rather have something that is known to work in the long term and not need update to patch bugs or possible changes to the config file implementation. let's just use something that we know works.
on the other hand, couldn't it be an optional package (a package is required but there are multiple to choose from) with the default as systemd?
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
...is that "systemctl" is a lot of keys to type, and the last four are all consonants.
At least "service" is an actual word.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
ironic how this has been rated -1 offtopic. lol.
Then why's mgt. here pulling a "Windows 8" trying to shove beta on people that don't want it? Answer (always is) is money. Tracking and money via cookies and javascript. They are going to destroy this place with that. Steve Ballmer must've taken the reins as the NEW CEO of /., eh?
./.
Debian user of the year I take it?
s/racism/homophobism
And don't care much for the cancerous systemd and the continuing Microsoftification of Linux, just because systemd is the "new thing" and "new thing" has to be better.
You are our only hope to get rid of this bullshit about to infest our systems.
How about you learn to use google.
You'll need more than a shotgun if you head my way, punk.
And looking at your username, your shell won't help you a bit.
I couldn't care less that the protesting about beta has your panties in a knot.
We are fighting the change to beta with the tools available to us. If you don't want to be in the conflict, just leave....no one is stopping you.
If you are going to sink to physical threats, then I am your Huckleberry, bring it on if you are more than talk. I'm in Oklahoma, and posted my address prior on /. if you are serious, otherwise you can STFU, IMO.
I'm also off work recuperating from a surgery, so time and schedules are not a limiting factor. Come on! I'll even give you a handicap: I ONLY get to use my issued Ka-Bar!(that's an indication of how much of a threat you really are)
BTW, you could use a LOT of work/education on your insult/name-calling skills, as they are currently presented, they're pretty lame. ;-)
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Yes, yes, Gnome3 depends on logind/systemd. Also ConsoleKit ceased development. It's almost as if they think it's a better technology. But hey, you want to install a massive monolithic DE, it's gonna pull in some dependencies that you may or may not like. That is not Debian's problem, actually -- if they showed any signs of being amenable to discussion on the matter, then you might complain to the Gnome developers.
This vote ignored the issue of what kind of default the default should be, because it only had one question that was being decided. It is unlikely to be the end of the discussion on the matter, so I am sure that all those with opinions will get their fair say -- just not on this vote. I realize that the vote may not have gone your way, but those grapes were probably sour anyway.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
That's not true at all, otherwise Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson would be ostracized instead of valued White House guests.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Why don't they just switch to openRC.
It is actually cross platform (i.e. can also be used for BSD)
I am not putting a convoluted, megalomaniac-spawned and KISS-violating atrocity like systemd on my systems. The binary log-format alone is a faux pas to severe as to invalidate the whole thing. Are there any good server-distros left that stay away from systemd or that are at least commited to maintaining a different init system longterm, preferably the classic SysV init?
Of course systemd will fail eventually (once enough people realize it is a bad clone of what Windows does and makes things worse, not better), but I am unwilling to wait that long or tolerate all the disadvantages this thing brings in the meantime.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
If not good alternative presents itself, I may just rip it out myself and stay with SysV init. Boot-times are pretty irrelevant, especially for a server-distro like Debian.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Ah yes, the appeal to labels rather than substance. So unlike the poster you reply to.
Linux is no longer Unix-like and is slowly turning into some sort of a Windows hybrid (RedHat and others) that will ultimately become the enemy of Unix. Terrible decision by Debian. Other Linux distros will follow suit and will most certainly become non-Unix more and more as time reveals their true intention.
Go Gentoo, its your birthday!
Gentoo forked it the minute we saw this coming.
This site used to be great. Even in it's latter days, it's been good. That is poised to change. Before long, it will be mediocre, and ordinary.
I didn't see a problem when Dice Holdings initially bought Slashdot. I figured there would be efforts to drive nerd traffic towards their job listings and such. That was fine. We all need jobs.
Things have changed now. Beyond the shifts in story choices, the slashvertisements, and so on, something fundamental has changed: Slashdot's owners do not appreciate it.
Their recent financials show that they have written its value as an asset down to zero. They have legally claimed it to be worthless. That is at the root of what is happening now. They want to fundamentally change the nature of this site in order to remake it into something with big growth potential.
Beta is just the latest symptom of this disease. It will not be the last. In striving to make it into a site that will bring them a growing user base and growing revenue per user, they have shown a willingness to dumb down the interface in the name of making it more accessible to newcomers, to cast aside essential elements of decade-spanning community culture, and to plow ahead with changes in the face of overwhelmingly negative user feedback.
This is not going to change. This will not go away. I will not support it.
I will be gone for this entire week, in protest. While away, I will work to create a new community where things can be run with quality user discussions as the paramount objective.
Be seeing you.
I'm among the many who have built up a healthy aversion to certain software after having been repeatedly burned by Pulse. I would not have chosen systemd. That said, I have tremendous respect for the Debian team, and am optimistic that the worst of the problems we find with their choice will be addressed within a couple of years. Let's get the bickering out of our systems quickly, and move on to helping one another turn the new init into something genuinely good.
If I wanted to run a huge monolithic system, where the people building the system want to tell me how to use my computer, I would be running Windows 8.
As for ConsoleKit, what? I've never felt the need to install it. Seems like it was always just a precursor to systemd. Other than that, I never figured out what it really is. The closest thing I ever found to documentation, made it sound like it's a way of overriding the security of the system, allowing people who should never be allowed to run anything as root to do just that.
ConsoleKit, RootKit... Perhaps not coincidental that the names have so much in common.
Cgroups is a kernel feature. It worked fine before systemd. Now, though, the systemd people have decided that they be the owners of this kernel feature, and nobody else be allowed to use it.
Yet, every distro that decides to jump on systemd, suddenly adds the requirement that /usr be on the root partition.
Maybe the distroes know something that the systemd propaganda forgets to tell.
Yes, that's the official systemd propaganda.
Yet, /usr on a separate partition has always worked, and unless you can afford a one TB SSD (preferably two, these things are not relibable enough to run without RAID), putting / on an SSD and /usr on a one TB hard drive is a great idea. Only when systemd comes along do distroes start requiring /usr on /.
As for initramfs, anyone suggesting to me that a server use initramfs, will be forced to fix a non-working initramfs, using only the tools available on said initramfs, and making the change stick for long enough to reboot the machine and run mkinitramfs. Failing that, they will be transferred over to the other "format and reinstall" Windows admins.
You're only seeing the positive sides of it, you haven't experienced the downsides yet.
Last time I tried displaying log files using journalctl, it took half a minute(!) to display the entire log! Considering the two most common operations I do are "tail /var/log/foo" and "tail -F /var/log/foo" and the first thing suddenly takes 300 times longer, and the second thing is impossible, I say journald as a log system is broken.
Not to mention that journalctl will bail out after disk corruption, since it's binary log files suddenly aren't in the format it expects.
There's no way to fix this, because they're fundamental issues with binary logging. Binary logging is, will always be, and has always been broken and a *bad idea*.
So does "default on linux" mean I can use the alternative kFreeBSD/Hurd init on Debian/Linux as well? Because I can't use systemd on HA clusters, where the service management is done by something else and init can't demand to be the only cgroups writer. Upstart would be painful enough, but systemd is impossible.
Perhaps I'll take a closer look at mint, after all. Or is there a binary distribution using an init that restricts itself to init? Integration with service management is a problem for me.
as a debian user i am puzzled by why this monstrosity was chosen instead of something that adheres to the 'do one thing and do it well' philosophy. why are we slowly turning gnu/linux into windows?
Zawinski's law: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
i propose we include an email client functionality now and be done with this horrible one-thing-breaks-all thing.
Just you wait, Leisure Shit Larry. Soon Dice is going to put the hammer down on known trolls like yourself.
Don't be a pretentious douche. It's not like he said, "Ubuntu: It's Debian for Shit-Colored Niggers."
This is high-school internet tough guy crap, c'mon guys. Be less obvious.
Makes room for other sites that can manage their finances and have a better business plan. We are a large audience dying for high quality tech & science journalism because there just isn't enough of it, it is possible to make money out of us.
read more at http://ewontfix.com/14/
Email debian:
727708@bugs.debian.org
debian-devel@lists.debian.org
Tell them Fuck Systemd
Don't let lennart pottering (harry potter?) take over all of linux. Don't let his fan bois conquer debian.
We need a General Resolution to overturn this crap. The systemd people might be a majority in key positions, but likely not elsewhere.
Let your voice be heard.
read more about it at: http://ewontfix.com/14/
multi-culty really gets on your nerves, doesn't it?
Please elaborate.
I can't criticise personal choices. (It seems he has approximately the same problem with Ubuntu as he does with black or gay people though.)
Actually, I think it's partly the embedded people who are pushing for systemd. Which worries me, since many of them don't know or care about Unix.
Sourceforge: Now Spyware.
Debian: Rolling releases and Harry Pottering Taint.
Semantic Desktop: Shoot me.
Slashdot: Intent on becoming Pentrest apparently.
Cyogenmod: Sells out.
Freshmeat: Can't even recall what bland name they changed it to.
Wayland and Vnc: Fuck that.
Fuck where is safe Are any of the bsds safe? Theo is a dick so wtf is a neckbeard to do.