Slashdot Mirror
Longtime Debian Developer Tollef Fog Heen Resigns From Systemd Maintainer Team
An anonymous reader writes Debian developer Tollef Fog Heen submitted his resignation to the Debian Systemd package maintainers team mailing list today (Sun. Nov. 16th, 2014). In his brief post, he praises the team, but claims that he cannot continue to contribute due to the "load of continued attacks...becoming just too much." Presumably, he is referring to the heated and, at times, even vitriolic criticism of Debian's adoption of Systemd as the default init system for its upcoming Jessie release from commenters inside and outside of the Debian community. Currently, it is not known if Tollef will cease contributing to Debian altogether. A message from his twitter feed indicates that he may blog about his departure in the near future.
Taking advantage of your presence in here and, trying to keep as much away from the merits of the criticism (or lack thereof), can you shed some light on the process that led to the adoption of systemd as the default init system for Debian?
I'd just like to take the opportunity to thank you for your work. I have used Debian for many years now and feel I seldom get the opportunity to say how much I appreciate it. So, a big thank you to you and the many other hard-working individuals creating Debian! Don't let this argument stick to you. I hope you continue with other Debian stuff! You are truly doing a magnificent job!
1) Grab the bootonly iso. /etc/rc.config /etc/rc.config
2) Install it as described in the Installer.
3) pkg install vim
4) pkg install mc
5) pkg install xorg
6) pkg install xfce
7) echo "hald_enable=\"YES\"" >>
8) echo "dbus_enable=\"YES\"" >>
9) reboot
10) login and enter "startxfce4"
No one is forcing you to use it!
Yeah, it's not like other projects like Gnome 3 are deliberately making themselves dependent on systemd, is it?
What do you think is the greatest misconception people not liking systemd have about it?
It's a new system, so some things work differently. Many people seem to fail to see the line between bugs and intentional behaviour. If something doesn't work as before, it might not be because we're evil bastards who are out to steal your logs. It might just be that there's a bug in some package which means your logs aren't correctly forwarded from the journal.
Sometimes it might be that systemd makes other assumptions about what something means and we're just failing to catch that in an upgrade check that should warn you about this. An example here is missing devices/mount points in fstab: sysvinit will happily ignore them, systemd won't consider local-fs.target reached and you'll have to fix your system for it to boot correctly.
Assumptions, as so often before, are the mother of all fuckups. Asking (preferably in a civilized manner) will get you a long way: "Hey, I'm not seeing my logs appear in syslog, is this supposed to be that way, and if not, can you help debug?"
This might not be the greatest misconception, but I think it's the most common one. The greatest is possibly the conspiracy theory that this is all a takeover attempt from RH to kill other Linux distributions and that people pushing systemd are either shills or just unwittingly working against the distro they're pushing systemd into. I'm not sure how adopting a free software component (which sure, happens to be largely maintained by RH engineers, like many other free software components we use to build a distro) will turn us all into corporate-loving robots giving up freedom to be near the source of systemd.
Debian have many good sides. It also suffers from fractions; the problem isn't so much that people disagree about some time petty technical things, but that they abuse the Debian bug tracker and governmental system in order to feud their petty wars on usually innocent package maintainers. By filling "political" bugs together with a lot of whining and twisted representation of facts, and then run and complain to higher ups in the hierarchy, they can force the package maintainer into endless, repeated explanations why things are like they. You can basically force the package maintainers to always be in defensive position. Not fun at all.
In this case it is the "anti-systemd" faction that is abusing the system and the developers, but there have been several other, perhaps smaller cases before this.
The "anti-systemd" faction probably just think they are fighting with their backs against the wall, trying to claw out a place in Debian with any means necessary before it is "too late".
But if they keep on attacking Debian developers like they do now, I think their strategy will backfire. Before the bitter systemd debacles started, most Debian developers where probably quite keen to support non-systemd inits too. But this rather poisonous war just never seems to end, so some Debian developers are starting to think, that the only way forward is an outright banishment of official SysVinit support after Jessie is released.
Well, no, it's not deliberate. They are dependent on systemd because ConsoleKit is dead and rotting, and no other system provides the features they need. They would be happy to lose that dependency if there was an alternative.
But you're not helping, 0123456
0123456: What do you mean, I'm not helping?!
I mean: you're not helping! Why is that, 0123456?!
...
They're just questions, 0123456. In answer to your query, they're written down for me. It's a troll, designed to provoke an emotional response... Shall we continue?
I dont see an issue with systemd,
the issue isnt with systemd per se, the issue is systemd becoming a dependency of things that should not require it. for example, since systemd decided to eat udev, that means that every package that used udev now needs systemd. if you use any of the major desktops, it is a requirement. one the upside, it's fuelling the development of other desktops environments.
... let people who do not want systemd simply configure their system either so that systemd will start regular sys v init or bsd type scripts, or let them change /bin/init to point to the alternatifve init system of their choice.
there is a problem with that, it means systemd is running. there is an additional opposition to systemd itself, the most universally relevant reason being that systemd has a HUGE attack surface. the other reasons all feed into this one issue, it's a blaring and blindingly bright security issue.
btw, if you are GNOME2/MATE holdout trying to escape systemd like me, consider using LxQt. it's still a work in progress but it's usable as an everyday desktop environment.
LxQt repo (works with debian jessie):
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
And the criticism from those who are against systemd is extremely important to consider. The complaints are very sound, from a technological perspective. They're also based on decades of real world experience, which just cannot be ignored.
Systemd is inherently contrary to many of the core philosophies that underlie the Debian project, and that underlie UNIX and UNIX-like systems in general. Many of the criticisms of it just cannot be refuted. Bad ideas will be bad ideas, and systemd is objectively full of them.
In hindsight, it's obvious now that systemd should never have been integrated into Debian the way it has been. Debian should have indeed been forked, but with systemd going into this fork, rather than traditional Debian. Only after it had been proven as a suitable replacement should it have ever been considered for integration into mainline Debian.
Personally, I don't think the Debian project will survive. It may survive in name, but it will become weakened and irrelevant, like the XFree86 and GNOME projects have become. This truly is one of the most disturbing events to have hit such a major open source project. The worst part is that it's all so unnecessary. Debian didn't have to die as a project, and it especially did not have to die thanks to systemd of all things.
I had this problem recently when I upgraded my Mac OSX installation to 10.10. It completely broke the /media/OSX mountpoint when the hfsplus filesystem was upgraded to CoreStorage and the hfsplus Linux support broke. The last thing I needed was my Debian installation to crap itself when I was just trying to boot into Linux for the first time since replacing/fixing the bootloader which OSX broke. A lot of people dual/triple booting are going to be affected by these changes. I honestly don't know if systemd is a good thing or a bad thing, but I'd have liked there be a lot more information about this change before it appeared in Debian.
As was mentioned just before, I am also concerned that this change is potentially going to break cross platform compatibility with BSD/Solaris/Other Unixes. I develop software which was gtk based and it sounds as if gnome is going to require a lot of dependancies which are not available on other platforms.
Maybe accept that the larger group of people you're a part of has come to a decision you disagree with, and move on?
That's not what happened, however. A very small group of people, divided in itself, reluctantly came to a decision that affects others — and these others do not clearly support that decision in the majority either.
People who can't let go of their personal hobby horse can be utterly poisonous to an organization, no matter how righteous they view their cause to be.
So you're saying that systemd is a mistake?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"systemd does the right thing by stopping normal boot and just boot into a safe, minimal shell. A quick glace in the log file (journal) will instantly tell you (using red letters for emphasis) that fstab is broken in such and such a way. A quick edit with Vim can then solve the problem." - did you miss these lines in his comment? Just how "far" is "far enough" ?
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
I've once had sshd randomly crash. Very randomly. Nothing appeared to cause it and it has worked ever since. A headless server with no management console. I wonder to this day if I had another option than simply hitting the reset button on the front.
What if it was someone attacking your sshd and making it crash when it failed?
By automatically restarting it, you just allow the attacker to continue trying to exploit it.
By automatically restarting it, you don't solve the issue that makes it crashing.
By automatically restarting it, you, most of the time, don't even see it restarted, so really not giving you any way to solve the real problem.
It's not that I don't find process monitoring interesting, it's just that automatically restarting can bring more problems than it solves. A little bit like "ohh, my server doesn't seem to be working correctly, let's reboot".
A well behaving daemon shouldn't be restarted (except maybe for rereading config files), it should start and stay that way. If it crashes randomly, then you might try to find the bug.
OK, that said, you can now flame me if you don't like this.
I gave up with the idea of an useful sig...
Yep, I have just asked myself that too many times. It goes without saying that the deeper you dig, the systemd decision is political one and not a technical one. Furthermore, it is rather stupid that forcibly all the installations or upgrades are made to systemd without your decision or consent.
people are talking seriously about forking Debian over this
No they are not,
Yes, yes they are.
and no they don't need to.
Yes, yes they will, because once systemd becomes the default init system, init scripts will suffer.
(And, even if they did, that's what Debian is for!)
The base Debian system should use the basic init system. If they want to offer the option to switch to another init, so be it, but making something new and not fully tested the default is daft and we all know it. Debian is the rock that many of us depend on whether we run Debian or a downstream distribution. It's been my go-to for ages specifically because of this stability. Debian stable is boring and I love it.
systemd will be the default init system in Jessie. If it is the only init system in jessie that is not the fault of the systemd team.
Riiiiight, the team that's been pushing for its default inclusion?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"