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Debian Talks About Systemd Once Again
An anonymous reader writes: A couple of months ago the technical committee for Debian decided in favor of systemd. This is now a subject for discussion once again, and Ian Jackson says he wants a general resolution, so every developer within the Debian project can decide. After a short time, the required amount of supporters was reached, and the discussion can start once again.
Hopefully they'll come to their senses and reject the disease that Pottering has cursed the Linux ecosystem with.
A very well written proposal that outlines many of the concerns I (as a non-Debian user) and I suspect most have about systemd. It’s worming it’s way into everything for the sake of better integration, which it may deliver on, but this goes against much of the traditional Linux spirit of small self-contained bits that can be swapped out at will.
In my mind, this comes down to whether we want a better functioning OS or an OS that adheres to the mindset that I think attracted many of us to Linux in the first place. Personally I want a hackers OS that I can play with and tweak as I feel like, but I accept that many people basically want open source windows or even just zero cost windows (i.e. free as in my wallet).
I hope Debian rolls back on their decision. I doubt this will happen, but at least we’ll get some more discussion in a somewhat visible forum. I may not agree with a lot of the Debian mentality, but they are very good at thinking about and discussing things, so I think this will be good overall.
And before someone says "just use gentoo", I do, and have for almost a decade (I started using it fairly soon after it came out). The problem is that systemd, being basically a virus at this point, is causing exactly the kind of problems mentioned in the proposal. I've had to use the blacklist for the first time in a while because *McBane voice* the use flags, they do nothing!
Debian is by far the most stable of the Linux distros. systemd does not lend itself to this stability. Nothing wrong with the old init system. We all know it and its quirlks. I fell in love with UNIX because of editable text config files. Every aspect of the system needs to be editable by an admin. Linux is losing morally to OpenBSD because OpenBSD does not allow binary blobs in the system. Ever. Debian should be the same. No binary blobs of any kind. If it's not text, it doesn't belong.
I've been a Debian user for 14 years now, please do the right thing and get rid of systemD.
I've been trying systemD on another machine for about a month now, it's not terrible but it's not all it's cracked up to be either.
The part that I don't like (besides it going against the unix philosophy) is how fast it's taking over before the majority of the Linux community even had a chance to have their say. And what really gets me is, if systemd was just an init system, fine. But at the rate they are going there is going to be a systemd everything.
The summary is completely wrong. They are not discussing systemd, just whether packages can depend on a specific init system. I thought there was some kind of moderation here?
I could see why a desktop user might want to have such a thing as systemd (not me though), or someone with no admin skills having a canned all-in-one solution for their little business or hobby website.
But for where Linux dominates, server and embedded systems, I don't believe it fits into the Unix way of doing things and makes admin harder.
is for me that it isn't interoperable. Please correct me when I'm wrong, but AFAIK systemd never did anything to create standards their new functionality is compatible with. Instead they only support linux APIs. I recognize that their needs exceed POSIX, but their current approach "lets make everything a hard dependency" is -to be polite- hacky. It doesn't have to be an official ISO standard, a simple document that ensures exchangeability of components inside systemd, and perhaps even makes systemd cross-platform.
Seriously, why not OpenRC?
It solves all the deficiencies with classic init, but at the same time it doesn't have the interoperability problems and un-Unix-like feel of systemd.
Hello,
I have deployed some fedora 20 machines in the last 3-4 months, and so far I did not see anything that led me to cry foul against systemd.
Actually, the handling of the user sessions for house-keeping purposes seems much simpler now.
So I don't get all this hate. Maybe I did not look deep enough, time will tell.
Cheers
Zed: Nothing is ever easy
good call. Then, instead of one distro that's 5 years out of date, we can have two distros that are ten years out of date.
But seriously, systemd sucks. I don't understand why people would take a good operating system (and this has happened with Windows (vista and 8), OSX (Yosemite), and GNU/Linux (gnome, systemd)) and ruin it for the sake of ruining it.
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Maybe Potering and his other buddies at RedHat are great, the best thing since sliced bread.... but... they are working on the wrong OS. These guys don't belong in Linux. They belong working on ReactOS! Imagine ReactOS with all of RedHat's resources behind it. It could quickly be a better Windows than Microsoft's! Meanwhile those of us who like Linux as Unix and aren't in the market for "Free Windows" can go on enjoying a better Unix than Unix. We could all be happy!
For those who don't know, Ian Jackson was the most vocal anti-systemd proponent on the committee. Considering that last time systemd was up for vote he tried: strategic voting, usurping the committee chairman, and finally throwing a temper-tantrum and refusing to talk to anyone for a few days. When it was all over he promised to try and reverse the committees decision with a General Resolution.
And now having failed to win on technical merits, he is back at it again trying to kill systemd via 'loose coupling'. Something that the committee declined to rule on.
It isn't developers or distro maintainers who hate systemd
I'm a developer and I hate systemd.
It can't do event driven launches and yes it does impact desktop users. Example, your on your corporate network on a laptop and you close the lid and take a plane to somewhere else and the laptop wakes up. How can Init handle something like this and know to configure it to a new network?
This is why Sun, Apple, and Ubuntu developed their own event driven systems. System D is not good. But event driven systems can respond to events like a hack attack, excess load, and other things for servers.
Init was made for stationary mini computers with only 20 text based commands and apps. It's not designed for the hacks we use to get it to work today on modern systems
So why would/should that be a function of an init system, and not a function of, say, an event driven network daemon that gets started by init on bootup - and receives event notifications on you opening/closing the laptop lid (suspend/resume)? Why should that need an entirely re-written init system when it could easily be done in just a (rewritten) network daemon using the existing init system?
Sounds to me more like entirely missing the point of what the init system is supposed to do... which is *not* reconfiguring NICs, etc (those are functions of the scripts/daemons it starts).
Remember this before ranting too much on Lennart. He is not in any position to force any distribution to do anything. Distributions choose to use his software because it actually is better than the stuff that came before it.
Yes, of course Lennart's just a developer with a better idea. He's never seen software development as a means to a larger political end.
Except when he has:
All of these disingenuous statements that there's no other agenda in place are just bullshit. They're simply and self-evidently not true, because you can't do system design without some kind of vision of what you want. And you don't change the system design unless you don't like the one you've got. Lennart's vision, as he says, is a 'streamlined' Linux, which is to say catholic, not agnostic, unified rather than pluralistic, with fewer options rather than more. And when you cut away all the cruft, it's his stuff that remains.
Poettering and his acolytes can argue all they like that their vision is simply better. I disagree, but I accept that this is always an argument worth having. But when you start arguing that POSIX is a constraint and that Linux should be 'leading' the way (and that POSIX can just catch up, thank you), you're taking a stance that is not simply in opposition to others, it cannot coexist with the others because the alternatives have become mutually exclusive within a particular space.
POSIX is a limiting factor. That's true. Its limitation is that we've all agreed on a basic subset of behaviours in order that we all have enough in common to interact. So when you discard POSIX, you have effectively announced that you do not see the value of playing nicely with the other children. From that moment, your 'better idea' is being implemented at the expense of interoperability.
Which is a really fucking bad idea.
(The quote above is from an interview with Lennart, linked from his Wikipedia page.)
Lastly, to respond directly to the assertion that he is not in a position to force any distro to do anything. The tight web of dependencies, his position at RedHat and the support and assistance provided on the corporate level is perhaps not sufficient literally to force a distro to use his software, but it's enough to raise the question that undue influence is being brought to bear and that rather questionable tactics are being indulged in expressly because Lennart and his cohorts think that doing the right thing does not imply contributing in an open[*] and inclusive way.
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[*] Lennart's idea of openness is allowing others to interact with his software, but fuck you if you want him to take a second look at your requirements. And then, of course, to act shocked (shocked!) when others get upset.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
systemd-journald has long been capable of forwarding the logs to rsyslogd. /var/run/journal, which gets deleted at each reboot.
And systemd-journald can even be configured to keep it's binary log in
And Debian uses this configuration for default.
Unfortunately, if they acknowledged this, systemd haters would be left with one less thing to hate.
Other functions provided by the systemd package (eg, session managment by systemd-logind) are just a lot of work to implement, specially if you try to go for a more decoupled architecture.
Not that people aren't working on it though.