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Debian's Systemd Adoption Inspires Threat of Fork

Posted by timothy on from the tine-to-weigh-priorities dept.

New submitter Tsolias writes It appears that systemd is still a hot topic in the Debian community. As seen earlier today, there is a new movement shaping up against the adoption of systemd for the upcoming stable release [of Debian], Jessie. They claim that "systemd betrays the UNIX philosophy"; it makes things more complex, thus breaking the "do one thing and do it well" principle. Note that the linked Debian Fork page specifically says that the anonymous developers behind it support a proposal to preserve options in init systems, rather than demanding the removal of systemd, and are not opposed to change per se. They just don't want other parts of the system to be wholly dependent on systemd. "We contemplate adopting more recent alternatives to sysvinit, but not those undermining the basic design principles of "do one thing and do it well" with a complex collection of dozens of tightly coupled binaries and opaque logs."

2 of 555 comments (clear)

  1. Re:UNIX Philosophy by armanox · · Score: 5, Informative

    We've tried having standards in Linux before, and they were utterly ignored (Linux Standard Base). Basically, there is no reason for certain groups or developers (Red Hat (and to a lesser extent, Canonical) and developer-who-shall-not-be-named) to listen to everyone when they can do whatever they want and everyone else has to deal with it.

    --
    I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
  2. Re:its not a claim, its a fact of life. by nabsltd · · Score: 5, Informative

    One might as well complain about all the basic utilities under the GNU project umbrella.

    I can use ls without having to use info, but I can't use systemd-networkd without using systemd. Conversely, there is no logging system other than systemd-journald that works with systemd.

    In other words, each individual program that makes up the "systemd brand" must all be installed and running or else none of them work. This is completely different from the current init system, which doesn't care which system logger (for example) you use, and doesn't even require you to use one at all.

    So, even though the "systemd brand" is many separate applications, the net result is no different from one monolithic application with many shared libraries.