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You Got Your Windows In My Linux
snydeq writes: Ultimately, the schism over systemd could lead to a separation of desktop and server distros, or Linux server admins moving to FreeBSD, writes Deep End's Paul Venezia. "Although there are those who think the systemd debate has been decided in favor of systemd, the exceedingly loud protests on message boards, forums, and the posts I wrote over the past two weeks would indicate otherwise. I've seen many declarations of victory for systemd, now that Red Hat has forced it into the enterprise with the release of RHEL 7. I don't think it's that easy. ... Go ahead, kids, spackle over all of that unsightly runlevel stuff. Paint over init and cron, pam and login. Put all of that into PID1 along with dbus. Make it all pretty and whisper sweet nothings about how it's all taken care of and you won't have to read a manual or learn any silly command-line stuff. Tune your distribution for desktop workloads. Go reinvent Windows."
What's wrong with services.msc on a Windows Server machine? Any serious answers from people who actually used it?
This space for rent.
Oh day of days! Now it needs to statically link in gconf and we'll all have a registry too!
Is anyone really concerned about this? Let me put on my prophetic wizard hat and predict how this is going to go from here:
I'm really not trying to be flip but this is just the FOSS process at work here. It's messy sometimes but so is anything that involves people. Embrace the ecosystem that makes this whole argument possible! If Apple or Microsoft decided they want some polorizing system like Systemd to be the new hotness in their OS offerings there's literally fuck all we could do about it. At least with the FOSS environment we have the freedom to make our own decisions
What I don't understand is why systemd advocates continue to not understand the perspective of those against it. Critics tend to recognize what systemd brings to the table and debate from that point. Advocates just call those people idiots, curmudgeons, and so on rather than understanding the perspective of the opposing viewpoint. It's quite maddening.
Init runs as PID 1. Systemd runs as PID 1.
Most init systems have a negligible amount of code running as pid 1, meaning init itself is unlikely to ever cause a blip at runtime. The complaint is what the implication for the complexity and volume of code in systemd approach. A better counter argument would be that the kernel itself has even more complex needs and runs in an equally critical context. That's a bit more defensible, though adding more complexity under that excuse is still a weak one.
Claiming that "lots of people don't like systemd equates to anything other than lots of people don't understand systemd, but will complain anyway is just stupid
No, lot's of people who know well enough how systemd works and still don't like it for valid reasons. No one claims it is not capable of things that classic init could not really do, but the question is the relative value of those features and what is given up in the pursuit of those capabilities. systemd is more monolithic in design, involves more compiled code beyond the reach of the typical shell capabilities of a sysadmin, and is more complex in its underpinnings in general. If your boot went off the rails in a classic init system, you can work through it using shell debug because it is comprised of a tiny bit of c code that hasn't changed in an eternity jumping into a sea of plain old shell scripts.. You can chroot and play around a non-booting image if needed. If systemd goes off the rails, it requires a much more complicated debug effort. You pretty much have to start up a container rather than just chroot (admittedly systemd provides a facility to mitigate the complexity of that task, but it is more complex than just chroot). It has a high likelihood of landing in some code a sysadmin is helpless in the face of compared to the same task in classic init scripts. A local mistake can escalate to systemd debug assistance more quickly. This is very much like Windows (which has it's qualities as well) where if things go off the rails very far, it's nearly a lost cause to sort out what happened and how to come back from it unless you have Microsoft developers ready to answer the call to debug it (and they almost never are).
Some people don't like them new fangled fuel injectors and still think a carburetor is the way to go as well.
And there are tons of carburetor platforms in the wild for brand new products. Try finding a leaf blower with fuel injection. The cost and complexity of a fuel injection system is too high in many applications. If cost and complexity were equal, then *everything* would be fuel injected, but cost and complexity are not equal. This is actually a very good analogy for systemd, capable of inarguably fancier tricks but the universe of mechanics who can repair it when broken versus throwing the whole thing out is much different. The relative merit though is more questionable (everyone benefits from lower fuel consumption and reduced uncombusted gasoline in the atmosphere, not everyone really benefits meaningfully from the advances in systemd).
What systemd advocates fail to recognize is that not everyone should have to be an application developer to administer systems. They assume minor configuration mistakes are all sysadmins have to contend with and thus they don't understand why a sysadmin might need to follow the flow of the init system in more detail and yet not have the ability to easily cope with systemd code. The 'DevOps' buzzword may embolden assumptions in some circles, but it does not mean that good sys admins have magically changed, just th
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I must fess up. I've used Unix since 1978. I cut my teeth on System V and I just fell in love with it's init.d system, where I could control an entire 80 port modem bank enable/disable with a simple change of the init state. telinit 5 - multiuser, telinit 6 - multiuser and modem banks. Heck you could even put that in a cron job. The init system of SYSV was simple, easy, powerful and logical. It is the UNIX WAY.
Fast forward to this labor day weekend, and I had to go into work for a 'Webserver Down' call. Sure enough a hardware failure, so I rebuilt a new system using the *Latest and Greatest* linux distro that was systemD. I needed Apache to fire up with an init.d script, when run-level 5 was hit. Oh wait, how do you do that? Well this is clearly explained so clearly and idiot could do it. It's in /etc/systemd in systemd.conf? Nope! Is it in /etc/systemd/system? Nope! Which one is it? I find a softline from system.default to /lib/systemd/system/runlevel5.target. I 'cat' and it says:
---
[Unit]
Description=Graphical Interface
Documentation=man:systemd.special(7)
Requires=multi-user.target
After=multi-user.target
Conflicts=rescue.target
Wants=display-manager.service
AllowIsolate=yes
---- /etc/rc initialization method. At least it's readable and understandable. All I want is add is Apache_special_ctl start in the initialization to multiuser mode. Were are the readable BASH scripts at? I'll try to emulate IRQBalance, When I drill down soft-link after soft-link I finally find this;
In other words this is a damn maze of BS! Some windows wanker wrote this puzzle to destroy Linux I'm convinced. I'm tempted to switch to BSD just to enjoy the
-----
[Unit]
Description=irqbalance daemon
After=syslog.target
[Service]
EnvironmentFile=/etc/sysconfig/irqbalance
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/irqbalance --foreground $IRQBALANCE_ARGS
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
----
Hang on, where did the variable $IRQBALANCE_ARGS come from? Grep? nope, more grep? nope! More google searches? Nope.
This is BS. I don't care if you can do a parallel start up (fundamentally you can't anyway, but in init you could use '&' idiots). The complexity added to the system start up and the 'telinit' process is inexcusable and is the worst computer science or computer engineering I have ever seen! It should be tossed into a dumpster! Seriously! Even young programmers will never figure systemd out. It's an undocumented programming maze of gotcha's.
Needless to say my efforts failed and I tossed the machine across the room for the fun of it.
Systemd developers deserves the finger for such an programmer unfriendly pile of trash that replaced elegance and simplicity.
I would be interested in the anyone's response to Lennart Poetterings rebuttal to the common complaints about systemd.
I'm too n00b to know who's right.
Full disclosure: I do not like systemd, although that judgment is based on its merits as I see them relative to my needs.
There seemed to be a pretty concerted determination not to get the point in Lennart's long spiel defending the system. As someone who has been using Unices in anger since the early '90s, I've pretty much seen Linux grow from its infancy. I've seen this kind of attitude before in technology — in Windows, Linux and elsewhere. The article is clearly written (and written clearly) by someone who's clever, articulate and... far too concerned with being right. It's not a healthy perspective.
Being technically correct is not generally optional. It's just not ever nearly as conclusive as some people think it is.
Having the humility to accept an imperfect universe — and to admit that it's imperfect in a particular way for a large number of particular reasons — is a virtue that fewer and fewer people seem to possess these days.
(It's the lack of this virtue that makes people say, for example, 'less and less' where I used 'fewer and fewer' and when someone corrects them, they trot out the grammar nazi epithet and say, 'Everybody knows what I mean. Deal with it.' And the lack of this virtue as well that will make people pick on the triviality of this example to discard my entire post. The temerity of such an approach cannot be explained to those who suffer from it.)
Systemd is clearly not change for change's sake. Lennart and the dozen and a half others who have commit rights are clearly scratching an itch. But regardless of the technical merits of the system, it is horribly, horribly wrong to impose this new system —any new system— on Linux wholesale without a significant maturing process. And by significant, I mean years.
And this is where Lennart's most completely mistaken. He thinks that the technical arguments are the decisive ones, in spite of the fact that technical merit is not why systemd is going to become prevalent. He therefore tries to write a technical opus in defence of the indefensible, which requires more than a few straw men (binary config files? shyeah....), several big ommissions (binary log files) and a clearly unwilled but nonetheless unforgivable ignorance of the fact that he's winning because he's RedHat, not because he's better. (Yeah yeah yeah, it's not all RH; it's others too, you're technically awesome - I read that part and remain utterly unconvinced by the argument.)
Paul Venezia's screed, on the other hand, is just plain substance-free. He's not arguing either technical merit or political power. He's simply looking at a looming mess and saying, well, that it's going to be messy. And to that extent, he's right. Systemd is going to make a mess, and that's precisely because its proponents think that they're perfectly within their rights to claim, 'Well, nobody's forcing anything on anyone.'
What they don't realise is that that is not how cooperation works. And believing you're better or righter than others is an absolutely shit way of improving your own software.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.