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Debian Votes Against Mandating Non-systemd Compatibility
paskie writes: Voting on a Debian General Resolution that would require packagers to maintain support even for systems not running systemd ended tonight with the resolution failing to gather enough support.
This means that some Debian packages could require users to run systemd on their systems in theory — however, in practice Debian still works fine without systemd (even with e.g. GNOME) and this will certainly stay the case at least for the next stable release Jessie.
However, the controversial general resolution proposed late in the development cycle opened many wounds in the community, prompting some prominent developers to resign or leave altogether, stirring strong emotions — not due to adoption of systemd per se, but because of the emotional burn-out and shortcomings in the decision processes apparent in the wake of the systemd controversy.
Nevertheless, work on the next stable release is well underway and some developers are already trying to mend the community and soothe the wounds.
This means that some Debian packages could require users to run systemd on their systems in theory — however, in practice Debian still works fine without systemd (even with e.g. GNOME) and this will certainly stay the case at least for the next stable release Jessie.
However, the controversial general resolution proposed late in the development cycle opened many wounds in the community, prompting some prominent developers to resign or leave altogether, stirring strong emotions — not due to adoption of systemd per se, but because of the emotional burn-out and shortcomings in the decision processes apparent in the wake of the systemd controversy.
Nevertheless, work on the next stable release is well underway and some developers are already trying to mend the community and soothe the wounds.
Go back 5 years and imagine yourself trying to explain systemd to all the Linux developers. One massive program running at PID 0 doing 100 different jobs from startup scripts to DNS resolution complete with binary log files and a completely different (but the same) set of tools o manage them (grep less awk tail). You would be laughed at and run out of town. Nobody would ever take you seriously again.
Can't wait for all of /etc to disappear and be merged into a single binary file like the Windows registry. I first ran into this nonsense when playing with a BeagleBone Black board. Go ahead and see if you can figure out how to change the ip address. In case you can't here is how you do it:
http://derekmolloy.ie/set-ip-address-to-be-static-on-the-beaglebone-black/
Tell me why any of that is necessary? It's exactly like how Windows manages network interfaces.
This is the same community that you can still start a street fight, or at least a troll war, by asking "Which is better: emacs or vi?" I'm not sure they're ever going to get over this. But, like the above question, the world will move on and leave them behind.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
some developers are already trying to mend the community and soothe the wounds.
I'm not sure that giving people warm fuzzies should take priority over steering the ship in a direction that has proven successful for more than a generation, and which has allowed diversity to flourish.
more insightfult news and posts from lwn. Regarding burnout and voicing concerns over systemd. lwn.net lwn.net
It's a bit more of a meta-outcome. The option that won the vote said, more or less: the General Resolution (GR) process in Debian is not the right way to resolve this dispute.
There was a proposed option which would actually have explicitly said: packages are not required to maintain non-systemd compatibility. But that option did not win.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Systemd works OK in Fedora, so I don't see a serious need to run to Slackware, but if I was running a server, then I would probably use FreeBSD anyway, not Linux.
Im not sure who at debian proposed this idea, that packagers be required to maintain support for non-systemd applications, but its untenable at best. It would mean a redesign of gnome, KDE, and a dearth of other code that in many cases makes no sense (how does networkManager get this treatment outside the scope of systemd?) this particular vote also smacks of an attempt at debian character assassination. the fact is that Debian, and Ubuntu, need to sit down and recognize is that open source software means If i, or users, want rc-init support in Debian for a package we can code it.. If the package doesnt do what we want we can either commit, fork, change packages, or change operating systems. Bureaucratic red tape seems to be an Ubuntu specialty thats strong-armed its way into debian from the start of Systemd. pointless electoral procedures avoid the cusp of the communities argument. SystemD is controversial enough that Debian should give the user the choice to decide whether they want systemd.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Doesn't all of this controversy, debate and hatred a clear enough sign that something is utterly wrong with systemd itself and/or it's adoption process?
Isn't this the part when a more reasonable community would stop all systemd related development altogether to root out the faults, at the basis of all: the concept?
There was no gain to be had from that vote.
A vote against systemd this late in the cycle would have created a big delay and a lot of code re-writes, bugs etc..
A vote for systemd (i.e. keep the decision previously made early in the cycle), would just piss off the developers and cause delay with a pointless rehash of old arguments.
So there was no win possible here. Debian has some poison people in it, having lost the decision over systemd they should have gotten on board and gone ahead, not try to scupper the project at the last minute.
As it happens, I don't agree with the systemd choice, I think its a nasty piece of bloatware, and don't use Debian. BUT the real world is full of bad choices, well choices I think are bad. To assume that your choices are so perfect (and by implication you are perfect) that you cannot be wrong and attack the project your working on to get your choices, is poison to a team.
This vote should never have happened, it should have been held again in the next cycle early in the development, once you are late in cycle these votes are political not technical and amount to sabotage.
Seriously, there's at least 3 or 4 systemd conf files you'll need to change.
Linux has become the laughingstock of the computing world thanks to the Systemd Fiasco.
An entire operating system trashed by a single incompetent clown and his shit pet project rammed down distro throats by his foaming at the mouth fanboys.
A healthy open source community would never have let this fiasco happen.
Hello FreeBSD. A pure Unix operating system run by grownups only interested in technical excellence.
There seems to be a little foaming at the mouth going on right there in your own post.
Nevertheless, work on the next ``stable'' release is well underway
My feelings on this matter? :(
I intensely dislike systemd and all of its methodology - it's not the Unix way, and I really dislike the systemd developer's attitudes towards bugfixes and other problems with their processes. Systemd is a solution looking for a problem.
As an admin in a company with something like 50,000 *nix machines, of which I have root on about 10,000 of them, systemd will not be making an appearance on any of these systems and the vendors have been appraised of this fact. Any vendor that cannot provide an alternative to systemd will not be in the running for the next phase of server rebuilds.
Personally, I think I'll be migrating all my own personal servers and the servers of my University's computer society to something a lot more useful and not requiring systemd to boot. Going to be a fun time.
- This sig deliberately left blank. Nothing to see, move along.
As the tentacles of systemd reach out and penetrate more areas of the system, more applications will inevitably require systemd which means that a Linux installation without systemd will only be able to run a small subset of Linux apps. Even though there are alternatives currently in the works for the init portion of systemd, applications are beginning to depend on the tightly-coupled processes that systemd requires which means that the only viable replacement for the entirety of systemd is another implementation of tightly-coupled procs which defeats the purpose of writing an alternative in the first place.
You are aware that most of the systemd daemons do NOT run on PID 1 (and none of them on PID 0), right?
Resistance is futile.
Linux is all about freedom of choice - If i wish to use systemd, i should be able to use it. If i wish to use upstart, i should be able to use it. If i plan to use daemontools, i should be able to use it.
What is needed is for a set of tools to be provided that would allow you to create services any way you want it after a package is installed. It may come with systemd scripts, or upstart scripts, or initscripts, but the tool should write startup files for the type of service you care to use.
PulseAudio, Plymouth, or other horrible things made mandatory. Still have issues with pulse introducing noticible latency in older apps, or it will freak out unplugging and plugging in USB audio devices. Plymouth had random issues with brand new hardware. They make these things really hard to remove off the system.
That SystemD is bad for Linux not because of the technical merits but the political BS drama it's spawning. Technical wise I can see why server admins want to have the fine grain control of their start up through individual scripts. It makes sense to me even though I don't do administration. KISS is the order of the day and flat text files beat out binaries any day. Now for desktops SystemD seems fine to me for people who run out of the box systems.
Honestly the whole thing sounds to be a fix that works better for some things but is getting shoved in to other areas where it isn't needed, wanted, and maybe even detrimental to the operation of other systems. Kinda like when Ubuntu/Gnome went with more touchy modern interfaces on desktops when really it was tablets and phones their interfaces made the most positive impact while negatively effecting others on the desktop.
I think it's time for some people to get over the one size fits all mentality in the Linux community. Obviously other people have problems with it and it's going to end up tearing you apart in the long run while scaring off others who sit on the sides playing with the toys you folks made up to this point. That's going to leave companies like Microsoft grinning like a Cheshire Cat.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
See that is the problem. What happened to ifconfig? What was so bad about it? Where is ethernet-static config located and what man page would tell me that systemctl is the command needed?
Still have problems with Pulse introducing latency and buffering issues in older apps. Still occasionally freaks out adding and removing USB audio devices. Occasionally have issues with Plymouth and new hardware. Why do they build up all these layers and dependencies, and make it hard to remove them?
But good luck making any modern hardware function properly!
Systemd appears to me like the Dolphin of init. Dolphin had the clear mission: To be simple to use. They were willing to ditch the superiour Konqueror for it. OK, if for them one mission statement weighs enough to justify that, go right ahead. I think I'd still prefer Konqueror allthough I couldn't say if I'd be bothered to install it if presented with Dolphin as a default. Same with Systemd vs. init.
I personally am not sure if this thing turns out well. It all comes down to how good the systemd camp is at offering incentives to move to it and how well they develop. If the entire thing in the end turns out better than init and has less problems the bickering will stop. If not, Debian will switch back eventually and the systemd camp will be burnt for a long time.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Oh look!
One of the ten year old systemd fanboys speaks!
What a dunce.
Uses an alt account to mod down 'teh heritic' but quotes the heretical text in his own troll post that gets modded up by his foaming at the mouth buddies.
Way to go dimwit!
Yes, there are emacs/vi fights, but in truth these are in fun. There is not a single vi user who would say that they should build a distribution where emacs did not work. There is not a single emacs user who would say it is OK to build a distribution where vi did not work. Everyone in this community would really say, even though you may be stupid for making your choice, our distribution should work under whichever you choose.
This General Resolution was about making certain that the distribution still worked even if someone chose to use a different init system. I am not sure why that is contentious.
True, but this reminds me of Microsoft getting it's DOCX format labeled as an open standard. I have lost so much respect for the Linux community. At least Microsoft has a business excuse driving it's bad behaviors. What's your guy's excuse? I still haven't seen a single comment explaining why systemd is worth all this trouble. It doesn't matter if it's a little better. I has to be so much better than the existing systems to justify the thousands upon thousands of retraining for the end users and all the extra dev and documentation time that could have been spent improving things that were worse off. A little better doesn't cut it.
Rubbish. FreeBSD is insecure crap. You should be using OpenBSD.
OpenBSD is run by that thug Theo, you should try NetBSD.
What a jerk - only a loser would use NetBSD, it's DragonFly or nothing.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
I expect things to happen just like GNOME3:
STEP 1: Big change, didn't really think that one out...
STEP 2: Community outrage, people whining, people migrating away
STEP 3: Some development versions away, things actually starts to work, requested features are being added
STEP 4: We get to a pretty nice project in itself, it has identity, it has what was intended, it has far less users (ungrateful bastards!!!)
PROFIT?
Should we get involved into the design of systemd and make it take on our own problems I'm sure it will turn out just fine. After all, the stakes are high, the stakes are many. I for one eagerly await for systemd to add plain text log/config support, just like mother UNIX wanted. Until then begone!
uhm...
Congratulations, this is you! http://imgur.com/PKW2GRq
You're barking up the wrong tree. I don't think you remember how things were before PulseAudio.
You had /dev/dsp or later /dev/snd. Since the kernel doesn't do sound mixing, they were one user only, unless the soundcard provided mixing. Which a lot of them didn't. So esd, artsd and similar appeared. Running KDE and want sound in the one Gnome app you use? Have fun making esd run against artsd. Want to run an old game or app that only knows about /dev/dsp? Sorry, artsd has it busy. You make it auto-close the device when unused? Unreliable as hell. USB audio? what is that? Certainly no plugging and unplugging support there. For a while dmix was all the rage. Thing is, dmix is implemented in the ALSA libraries, which means it does nothing for you unless your app uses ALSA libraries, so it doesn't help your any with your /dev/dsp using app.
PA was created to solve all this mess. PA basically handles everything and provides interfaces for everything, so finally pretty much all apps can talk whatever protocol they like, and work. And audio can be reconfigured as you plug and unplug devices.
Was it unreliable for a while? Yes. But there is still nothing better. The kernel doesn't mix audio. You need a daemon by design, and you need something PA-like to provide a modern level of functionality. The only way to do without PA is have the kernel implement all that, and as far as I know, the kernel devs don't want it.
IMHO it was good that it ended up with the outcome it did. You'll notice that the option "we should not have a GR about this" won. What it means is that Debian elected NOT to try to force any particular solution through, but let things settle themselves through consensus decisions by individual package maintainers.
If enough people care about sysvinit, it will survive and thrive - if not, it will die in Debian, just like other things that have been abandoned. Whether project X is your pet project or not, this is just natural software evolution. You can't be in the software world for long without seeing something you like rot and be disbandoned.
True, but he's not wrong!
https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/11/msg00091.html
I am resigning from the Technical Committee with immediate effect.
While it is important that the views of the 30-40% of the project who
agree with me should continue to be represented on the TC, I myself am
clearly too controversial a figure at this point to do so. I should
step aside to try to reduce the extent to which conversations about
the project's governance are personalised.
And, speaking personally, I am exhausted.
The majority of the project have voted to say that it was wrong of me
to bring this GR at this time. Despite everything that's happened, I
respectfully disagree. I hope that the next time a controversial
issue arises, someone will step forward to advance what might be a
minority view.
Thanks to everyone who has served with me on the TC. I wish those who
remain on the TC the best for the future and I hope that you'll find
colleagues who are as good to work with as you have been to me.
I now hope to spend more of my free software time doing programming.
dgit is at the top of my Debian queue, but some of my GNU and SGO
projects could do with attention too.
Thanks,
Ian.
"Foaming at the mouth" is an expression that signifies intense anger. His post can't really be compared to the shitstorm that is SystemD-gate.
OpenBSD is run by that thug Theo
Do not care if he's a thug. He's an excellent BDFL. Shit works and it works securely (by comparison with <insert-anything-else-here>).
Do not care if it's slightly behind. Less shiny is a small price to pay for real stability. I don't need the latest eyecandy (I fucking hate eyecandy) because I'm trying to get work done, not pimp out my desktop with the modern equivalent of dancing girls like some pimply-faced teenage dork.
Do not care if my system takes 30 seconds longer to boot. Do not care if it runs 1% slower. I don't bother with chasing the latest hardware--because there's no fucking point. It doesn't help me get work done any faster when I spend all my time in front of a text editor and a shell. I just buy a refurb'd Thinkpad and call it a day.
Debian was great; now, it's given in to chasing the geewhizbang instead of sticking to its guns. Screw it, I'm out. I have work to do.
I've been a Debian user for 14 years, and now it's time to move on. The Debian project no longer represents the guiding principles that it used to, and that I came to love. The principles including "universal operating system" and "the users first".
While some point out that Jessie can be hacked into avoiding GNOME/systemd, the fact is that the decision of this vote opens up a terrible attack surface for systemd to become entangled into further fundamental components of the OS, until we are left with some insane Windows SvcHost-type thing. There is an elevated danger that Pottering/Red Hat will stop nothing short of this, and Debian and other distributions are now helpless to prevent such a thing from happening.
The point of no return in this mess was the part when GNOME became dependent on systemd. The GNOME community has become so arrogant in the past years that I wouldn't touch their DE with a 10-foot-pole, but the Debian community gets the blame for making GNOME the default, rather than sticking with the sane XFCE. This adoption will likely start a domino-effect, in which more and more crucial programs will have a hard dependency on systemd, until you won't have a usable system without it. So the question I have is, where now?
Some Linux distributions, namely PCLinuxOS, Slackware, Gentoo, Crux are still holding out, but altogether they are so small that it's doubtful they can hold out for long before giving in. The fact they haven't yet converted to systemd does not stem from some conviction against it, rather than a belated effect to take action. If anyone has further information about the stance of these distros w.r.t. systemd, please post here.
The BSDs seem to be now the safe haven that Linux was in the nineties. Especially commendable is the GSOC project of OpenBSD, which will keep systemd-infested software usable without having systemd installed in the first place. My money is on OpenBSD or FreeBSD, though it seems that by flocking to these distros we once again have to deal with what we went through in the nineties with Linux: lack of good hardware support, no games, limited selection of software and being left out in the cold by every major developer.
In the end, Lennart Pottering is on the best course to achieve what neither Bill Gates nor Darl McBride was able to do, in spite of their best efforts: destroying Linux. The Linux ecosystem was strong enough to withstand any outside attack, but even it can be brought down if it starts rotting from the inside.
Hello FreeBSD. A pure Unix operating system run by grownups only interested in technical excellence.
...because no infighting ever happens with FreeBSD and causes it to fork off other distributions such as OpenBSD and NetBSD.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Neither side is being particularly constructive in helping fix systemd's issues.
Those in the systemd camp largely plug their ears and just think doubters are merely stubborn or unsophisticated enough to understand just how *awesome* it is and that it is worth the downsides (if they'll even admit something is a downside).
On the other side, mostly the criticism is just roll back and leave things as-is. Which leaves systemd advocates unhappy because they don't get their shiny capabilities at all. Not much discussion is had on how to amend certain strategies to placate the sensibilities of today while delivering the capabilities of something new. For example, if journald simply made plaintext logging alongside (not as a downstream add-on by piping to syslog, natively doing it alongside binary data), people would probably not balk nearly so much. If a systemd unit could degrade to start without being able to talk to pid 1 or cgroup support available (with loss of function), then some debug activity is made more straightforward in a rescue environment that may chroot (yes, spawning a container is usually possible, but why not degrade to cope to the extent possible). If open ended init scripts were better accommodated and didn't try to forcibly constrain sysv init scripts to force it to fit the only models that systemd understands.
Of course some concerns are more fundamental (bringing everything possible under one monolithic development effort rather than modular design that has discrete owners using simplistic yet consistent vocabulary to communicate with each other). But a lot of the specific technical issues could be alleviated by modification of systemd while preserving the stuff that there is to like.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
You're messing up badly. You seem to forget just how many lives you're affecting by this change. How many decades long sysadmins you're screwing with systemd.
Someone on /. must have some pull with Debian developers. Please knock some sense into these people.
I am pretty pissed of with this Linux community crap. Freedom has been touted for countless years and now this systemd is forced practically for everyone.
I am going centos->slackware (while it is "clean") -> freeBSD route myself. It is nice to switch to system which was said to be "irrelevant" By mr. poettering.
Free, Open, and NetBSD are completely separate OSes. The only fork relationship among them is OpenBSD being a fork of NetBSD.
PC-BSD is the equivalent of a "FreeBSD distribution" in the Linux world.
Fork ! Fork ! Fork ! Fork ! ! ! ! !
And fork systemd whilst you're at it ! ! ! ! !
We'll take it up the ass from Poettering and suck his dick, but sure as hell not in that order!
I've been using personally and professionally since 1998. I've seen the good and bad. systemd is bad. Full stop. It's being foisted upon every distro like or not. I don't like it. Like one poster said above, if it was that good, people would readily adopt it. I'm old enough to remember UNIX, VHS vs Betamax, real rock'n'roll and when girls were girls and guys were guys. I'm headed to FreeBSD, which will not be using systemd, and which is a complete OS from the start. As a former BSD admin from years ago, I've never, short of a hardware failure, had an issue with one of the BSDs. That's telling. I cannot say the same for Linux. I don't care what the pundits say about systemd. To me, it's embrace and extend.
I started in the early 90s with freebsd...
Now I'll be going back...
Its like going back to an old friend. One who trusts and respects you..
Instead of forces things on you... for your own good...
I'm not against change... but sometimes you gotta stick with what works...
It seems everyone has a dealbreaker... for me its binary logs. and the unending "Embrace extend extinguish" model. It feels infectious...
Of course the debian devs voted for it... for them , it makes their job easier.... Screw the people who actually have to use it!!!!
I don't need my servers to boot in 3 secs They have years of uptime. .. Hell the Dell bios takes 40 secs alone... I dont care about how fast the devs can make their macbook boot debian!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I didn't mind systemd until now when they decided it was effectively going to be the only option. I guess it's easier to not give users a choice, but wasn't choice the entire point behind GNU/Linux? At this point we have another OS core entirely, one that we might as well call SystemLinux to differentiate it from GNU/Linux.
I'm just glad some distros still have the sanity to give users a choice on their init systems. Time was I had control over what ran on many Linux distros, beyond them running the Linux kernel. Now I'm slowly getting an inferior, infighting version of OSX that seems to think it can run better on disparate systems by becoming monolithic and not leaving itself options.
I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said, "Stop! Don't do it!"
"Why shouldn't I?" he said.
I said, "Well, there's so much to live for!"
He said, "Like what?"
I said, "Well, are you religious or atheist?"
He said, "Religious."
I said, "Me too! Are your Christian or Buddhist?"
He said, "Christian."
I said, "Me too! Are you Catholic or Protestant?"
He said, "Protestant."
I said, Me too! Are your Episcopalian or Baptist?
He said, "Baptist!"
I said, "Wow! Me too! Are your Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord?
He said, Baptist Church of God!"
I said, "Me too! Are your Original Baptist Church of God or are you Reformed Baptist Church of God?"
He said, "Reformed Baptist Church of God!"
I said, "Me too! Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915?"
He said, "Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915!"
I said, "Die, heretic scum!" and pushed him off.
With the failure of this GR, it is clear that I can not trust Debian to ensure that systemd remains optional. As such, I cannot trust Debian to remain a distro that meets my needs. It's all well and good that the dependency will remain avoidable in Jessie -- that gives me enough time to enact my escape plan to BSD with minimal disruption.
I am so saddened by this whole thing. I am even more saddened that a wonderful distro that has served me very well has stopped doing so. But, I suppose, times change.
Now, we are witnessing what happens if you allow the bystander effect to pervade your community. It was ok for everyone to let Red Hat move developers into the lead positions of key projects and become their gatekeepers. Stuff was getting done, and it was mainly on Red Hat's dime, so everyone was content to just sit back and benefit from their work. But then Red Hat decided to make the projects it has control over interdependent on each other in such a way that you will no longer have the choice of cherry-picking what Red Hat technology to adopt for your use. It'll be pretty much all or nothing unless you have the resources of a large corporation to go it your own way. Suddenly the rational behind having multiple distributions is weakened because it you want to run a systemd system with wayland and gnome, why wouldn't you go with a distribution made by the company that's responsible for the creating and maintaining that technology in the first place? Debian's glacial pace of development, which used to be a feature for its stability and reliability, is now a detriment because the versions of systemd, gnome, gtk, selinux, dbus, etc. are going to be perpetually out of date and dependent on an upstream for fixes that couldn't give a shit about backporting patches. Prediction: Debian is not going to exist in 5 years.
...And all the rest being forked off of 4.3BSD back in the day. So if by "completely separate" you mean "not really separate at all," then sure.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
That isn't necessary. That beaglebone was running a 'network manager' called conman. You don't have to do that. Scrap conman, and setting up a static IP will be easy enough.
And if you disagree with them they inform you they will have you imprisoned via they police. ("harrassment")
Fucking scum.
I don't understand how this didn't get modded funny yet. Made my giggle like a school girl. tee-hee
Systemd supporters happen to all be feminists. Their other concerns are making sure Debian is welcoming to women and transgender people. Anyone not in line is kicked out of Debian. (See: Ted Walther)
The social justice crowd likes to fuck things up for everyone else, every time.
Notice how the US uses the social justice (feminists and gays) to cause havoc in Russian satellite countries, aswell as others? Well looks like we got that here too.
There are problems supporting several init systems. Take some complicated daemon that need a somewhat complicated script to start it (if done with a traditional init.) All other init systems will have to jump through some hoops to run the same 'complicated daemon'. Fine so far. Anyone who makes a distro, will have to support a working init system. But this gets boring quickly if you try to actually support 3 different init systems. Suddenly, anyone wanting to put another daemon into that distro will have to write initscripts (or similiar) for all 3 init systems, or have their contribution rejected. (Otherwise, they aren't supporting all these init systems.)
So it makes sense to support only one init system. Supporting both emacs and vi is easier - they don't mandate support from lots of other software. Debian has made their decision. You may not like it, but then you may go for another distro or roll your own. Or even fork Debian. You won't have to maintain the parts that aren't tied into systemd - which is a lot.
Thank you very much Debian for the past decade, it was nice using you.
FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and DragonflyBSD, all share a lot of code enhancements. Several times a year you hear how FreeBSD is porting kernel enhancements from NetBSD or OpenBSD is porting some sandbox code from FreeBSD or FreeBSD is importing better thread friendly data structures from DragonflyBSD. There is yet another BSD that recently forked FreeBSD with the sole purpose of being a test-bed for new security code testing, and when something works well, they'll push it upstream to FreeBSD.
Here some sentiments about systemd were put to word and tune:
http://youtu.be/y0aTqsl-vfU
I'm running arch. Arch moved to systemd before I understood the issues at stake. I feel the systemd pain every day. I'm trying to get multi-head with nouveau working (a different set of pain, that I'll probably just switch to nvidia blobs to get around -- unless someone can point me where I want to be -- but I digress)
...and I don't understand why "systemctl isolate multi-user.target" vs. "systemctl isolate graphical.target" [try explaining THAT pair of command lines to start with] can't be expected to be as dependable as "telinit 3" vs. "telinit 5".
If I couldn't ssh into the box from somewhere else regularly, I'd be hitting the Big Switch a lot and we all know how well file systems take that kind of shenanigans.
I don't need to wait five years to hate systemd. I hate it more and more every day. My feelings do not extend to the authors -- as humans, they deserve my compassion and (in this case) pity. But I hate their software with a passion that grows more intense by the day. This is a sad day for Debian, it was one of the places I was thinking of escaping to.
Still hoping for Gentle Treatment...
you cut all the tall trees down
you poisoned the sky and the sea
you've taken what's good from the ground...
(midnight oil)
and now this.
it's the end of the world
as we know it.
(r.e.m)
it's like climate change - either we get smart, or we get wiped out - debian, clearly, are not getting smart.
fork it.
Best of linux, before systemd. http://youtu.be/Bml5bjoMYjQ
I love Debian. It is the best operating system on Earth and is important for our future.
It does not surprise me that there might be certain actors intending to intentionally disrupt and destroy Debian but fortunately it is more than strong enough to withstand any covert, black op attacks.
As long as the people negatively affected are "CIS gendered scum" or "white males" (yes they do actually have white (french) male developers in debian that hate "white males").
Regular men were kicked out of debian years ago. (Ted Walther, etc)
In Lennarts own words on the topic of PulseAudio: "The software that currently breaks your audio".
I guess he managed to one-up himself with systemd. And it should be known as "The software that currently breaks the Linux community".
Nope, Linux is all about rights for women/feminists, trannies, and gays now. (Just read through the planet debian site, or matthew garret on lkml)
And if you disagree, as one Debian developer put it, the "van" will come and take you.
Capacha: tolerant
The summary doesn't make it clear that the two people whose ragequitting has been signal-boosted by clickbait sites so far have been systemd supporters. They don't state which side they take in their ragequitting messages.
It's not surprising: these people are so unbelieveably entitled and smug in their "I am a Debian _contributor_, not merely a user," status that they quit just because whiney users dared to voice an opinion instead of shutting up and taking the Debian they were given. Stated more sympathetically, they think the community should have simply deferred to their wisdom and seniority instead of invoking a kangaroo-court leadership "process" before rubber-stamping what they wanted to do. How dare these communists presume the right to compromise the artistic integrity of their great work which is systemd?
systemd seems to me like better quality software than what it's replacing and better architecture. I think it's time Unix moved on and got serious. Yet it's worth doing without this high-quality work just to get rid of the people who are writing it. Open source programming is not a performance, and users are not your audience. Even if it were, these guys would be the worst kind of performers, on-stage masturbators who just want one person in the back row to get it, and everyone else, "I don't expect you to understand. I expect you to watch."
thanks for your past contribution, seriously and without scare-quotes. Your work really has improved the world. But if you're quitting because it took you too long to get your way, there's the door you arrogant fucking prick. I don't think we'll miss you.
Don't wait five years. I find systemd to be more and more annoying every day. The closest things I can find to "telinit 3" and "telinit 5", "systemctl isolate mulit-user.target" and "systemctl isolate graphical.target" (and talk about convoluted command lines!) can't be counted on to stop and restart the GUI part of my arch box.
Give me back my sysvinit. It may have looked crufty to some but it worked. systemd? meh
Still hoping for Gentle Treatment...
Switching to Suse from Slackware in 1996 was a real improvement. Suse was great, they had the best possible desktop with KDE3.
But then Suse got bought by, I can't remember, IBM, Novell, and the distribution started turning into crap. KDE4 still sucks, and Gnome was never that great. Suse was not happy delivering a good user experience, they rather wanted to play with the big iron servers and sell expensive support contracts.
So, people switched to Ubuntu, around 2008. Ubuntu had a nice Gnome2 desktop, not as functional as KDE3, but still better as Suses broken KDE4 desktop. But Ubuntu was not happy to deliver a good user experience. They rather preferred displaying amazon ads, and torturing the power users with Unity, Mir, Wayland and such crap. So people have switched to Debian over the last two years.
Because Debian was the most stable and least broken Linux distributions out there. Because Debian did not have Unity, Gnome3, or systemd. systemd is really such a bad idea, it's incredible that this kid of developer can get so much support, after having messed up with pulse audio so much already. This whole adventure of systemd is doomed to go wrong.
IMHO, the Debian board is a good example why socialism is not working. Because it is a shady assembly of otherwise unemployed persons who make unsonud decisions about other peoples lives. Most likely, they have ulterior motives which we don't know and don't know about. It is doomed to fail, just like socialism.
Windows 8 sucks, Apple is as crappy as Gnome3 (presumably, Gnome 3 is a poor imitation of the Apple GUI).
So what is next? Linux from Scratch? And what will also run on Raspberry Pi? BSD?
Actually, I like BSD init. Compared to systemd, a plain shell script is a simple and clean solution.
Can please anybody recommmend or come up with a Unix/BSD/Linux distribution that has:
- BSD init
- KDE3
- and runs on 386, ARM, Raspberry Pi.
Thank you very much.
lol
43+ binaries, 253 .ini files, filename problems, multiple configuration directories, bloat to the maximum, and overboard scope and scale are just some of the issues with this steaming pile of horse dung!!! First off, the filenames. If you proceed to /usr/lib/systemd/system you will find ~270 files called 'units' in by the morons that created this dog turd. They end with extensions ".service .target .mount .automount .socket .path .slice .wants". Cups (linux printing server) has cups.path, cups.service cups.socket which should have all been combined into 'cups.ini' Similarly with the cups add-on services, cups-browsed.service, cups-lpd@.service and cups-lpd.socket. Why lie about what a systemd unit is? It's a microsoft .ini file and a poorly written one at that. If all of the ".service .target .mount .automount .socket .path .slice .wants" were combined into their respective .ini the ~270 units would drop to about 70 .ini files, which is manageable. Where is the KISS principle?
In that same directory the filenames give away the systemd brain deadness. If you go to /usr/lib/systemd/system and type 'grep Documentation *' using typical wild card filename expansion, grep will fail with "grep: invalid option -- '.' Usage: grep [OPTION]... PATTERN [FILE]... Try 'grep --help' for more information.". One of the filenames is '-.slice'. The filename begines with dash??? Not only is that not descriptive of anything, the "-." gets interpreted by grep as an option! That is just ignorant piss poor excuse to be cute! It really should have been named "root.slice" because that is what it is. Naming it "-.slice" is in-excusable.
Then there are the filenames with the '@' in them. While that is a legal filename character, what purpose does it serve? That is a stupid naming convention just like everything else with this moronic pile of penguin turds that is systemd.
The systemd Documentation also ticks me off. The file "-.sice" is documented with 'man systemd.special'. But if you want documentation on the binaries like; systemd-multi-seat-x type 'man systemd-multi-seat-x' and you get No manual entry for systemd-multi-seat-x. In otherwords, it's selectively documented. I would really like to know what systemd-multi-seat-x does but my only documentation is strings!
With strings, you find out one more thing. /usr/lib/systemd is the default directory for systemd -- the replacement for systemvinit. /usr is typically mounted from a separate partition. Having systemd use /usr/lib/systemd means that /usr/lib/systemd has to be part of the root partition. The implication of that is /usr has to be part of the root partition, and if /usr is mounted and overlayed on top of /usr/lib/systemd, there will be two directories that need to be maintained the root's /usr/lib/systemd and the /usr's /usr/lib/systemd. This could all be fixed by moving /usr/lib/systemd to /lib/systemd or better IMHO /etc/systemd but unfortunately that takes too many brain cells.
All of this points to how utterly unprofessional this systemd take over has been. If simple problems like these can't be recognized or dealt with early on, then there has been a break down between the developers and the community.
Let me recommend Uselessd. It has at least fixed the filenames.
Guess I'm not using debian anymore. F you to anyone who voted against this.
Honest question. What does Linux offer for servers that BSD does not?
Unfortunately, you summary is accurate. I still do not understand how these people could creep in. The sheer magnitude of resistance should give them pause and reconsider whether they may be doing something wrong. Instead: Total confidence, absolutely no acknowledging of problems, no interest at all in compromise. It it is almost like arguing with religious fanatics...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Indeed. Basically they voted to keep this unresolved for the moment. Of course, the systemd fanbois want to sell this as a victory for their side.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Perl is hardly an example of improvement. Its widespread usage despite its fundamental flaws has given us a large body of software that is often entrenched and almost always a maintenance nightmare. I hope our OS distribution maintainers have the sense not to repeat that mistake with our init system.
But a stalemate is essentially a win for the systemd fanbois. Now whenever they get a bug report about a package creating a direct dependency on systemd, they can mark it WONTFIX. Pretty the reason why the GR was held to begin with. But if the systemd proponents think that this will lessen the amount of criticism going forward despite their two-face effort to appear as gracious winners and appeal for healing within the community, they are going to be sorely mistaken. You shouldn't come back just yet, Tollef.
I don't see why your BeagleBone black example is systemd's fault. It has a convoluted way of managing network interfaces because it uses connman, a network-management daemon from Intel that is not part of systemd.
I installed ubuntu 14.04 on my BBBs. (Had to upgrade the kernel a little later because the 3.13.0 kernel wasn't ported to arm-on-bone in time to go out with the original 14.04 distribution and the 2.whatever they shipped didn't handle a class of USB device I needed, but it's fine now at 3.13.6-bone8.)
Changing to a specified, fixed, IP address was just a matter of editing /etc/network/interfaces, which was commented well enough (in combination with the man page on my ubuntu laptop) to make it easy.
(Main problem was that DeviceTree overlays weren't supported by 3.13.0-6, so I had to hack the boot-time base device tree to reconfigure for the onboard device functionality I wanted, rather than just overlaying the deltas during or just after the boot procerss.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
In less than two weeks we have had three significant resignations:
8 Nov, Joey Hess, from Debian entirely
17 Nov, Tollef Fog Heen, from the systemd team
Today, Ian Jackson, from the technical committee
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Porting an HP-UX ServiceGuard system, I collapsed 40-odd services into runlevel 3 and 4. These became aliased essentially to ON and OFF for my operations people. This worked, but I would have appreciated granular control.
Inittab has a "respawn" function that lets init watch for your program and restart it when it dies - IF you don't daemonize. You also don't get the ability to launch as a non-root user (had to write a shim for that) or establish environment variables (had to script a shim for that).
I also wrote an /etc/init.d script to start any oracle instance mentioned in /etc/oratab with hard links to the script. systemd is not QUITE as flexible there, requiring me to maintain a separate service instance files for each ORACLE_HOME.
So yes, on the whole, I would have jumped all over systemd 5 years ago. As it is, I am even now looking forward to trashing all the glue I wrote.
That said, systemd needs a BSD-licensed multi-call binary like busybox.
p.s. Parent, it's PID 1, not zero. :)
While I liked Debian a lot more than Redhat (primarily once apt came out, although even just dpkg was always *MUCH* faster than RPM for upgrading systems. Redhat in fact was so slow that back in the early '00s I could install a redhat install on a laptop in 2-4 hours, whereas an upgrade would stretch out to 24+. While it's certainly much better today, the average redhat upgrade for a few hundred packages may take 20-30 minutes, whereas the Debian/Ubuntu equivalent will be done in under 10.)
My point with this however is: Neither Debian nor Redhat allow the level of customization needed today, and especially for an 'open platform to base other distros off', a system with both customizable source packages, as well as binary package generation is needed. Arch and Gentoo are a step down that path, but both have issues with their core packaging which calls for something better, although much like what brought Sorcerer,Gentoo then Arch around as replacements for Slack/Debian/SuSE/Redhat, the developmental irritation to spur on something new hasn't quite happened yet.
Once it does however the 'niche' will be filled once more, while the big players will grow fat, unmanagable, and eventually begin down the same path as Redhat, Debian, Microsoft, and IBM before them.
Apparently there are corruption issues in the display code on SPARC (I'm assuming endianness issues, since it creates garbage pixels at what is probably the 'end of line' character.) As such I installed fbgetty since it reduced some of those issues.
I've had to do similiar on serial consoles to ensure they functioned properly with the dialup modem I was using for console access.
Anybody fool enough to say 'since when have you ever had to do xxx' is probably not the intended user of said feature and really shouldn't be talking out of their ass regarding other's desire for the feature to be kept. It's right up there with people asking you why you'd want a pre-smog car when the post smog cars are so INFINITELY better. Still waiting on the Apocalypse so we can show people the answer on that one :)
Some addresses only show up in 'ip addr show', but not in ifconfig at all. I think because ifconfig uses bsd style network interfaces (such as eth0:1 for the first alias), whereas ip uses a stack of addresses. (If you have three addresses in 'ip addr show' you would have to do 'ifconfig eth0 0' three times to wipe them, or if you tried and change one of them that wasn't the first on the stack, accidentally replace it. If this doesn't make sense, you'll just have to go experiment yourself to find out.
That said, in day to day usage I *STILL* use ifconfig over ip because it makes it simple and fast to create/wipe aliases on systems for testing purposes. ip on the other hand requires remembering the whole address, rather than a simple alias like 'eth3:2' which can be wiped with 'ifconfig eth3:2 0' rather than 'ip addr del 192.168.1.5/24' or whatever the ip commandline is, which requires remembering the address and parameters you had set up for it.
It's about depending on a binary to change configuration. The conman example shows that in order to do anything with the connection, the conman utlity must be used. Apply this to systemd. If all changes to configuration must be done through the systemd binary, then you can't just use diff/patch to update a configuration file, or sed/awk/perl to make global updates on the configuration. It's taking power from the power users. I for one am seriously looking at FreeBSD and OpenBSD as my next server environment.
A Discussion on Poettering, Systemd, SysV:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Capacha: Contempt
I call him "lennart the seal"
as you can see, he likes penguins.
except in a VERY black way.
Still hoping for Gentle Treatment...
There is a lot of heat in this discussion, but not much light.
It seems the systemd developers and their managers have lost contact with some of the people that build and run linux server systems.
I am not taking any position on whether systemd or sysVinit is 'better'., but
What are the developers going to go off and change next?
Has the master forsaken us?
--
The year of linux on the desktop approaches, because the server rooms will all be BSD.
RH + Cloud...
The rest piggyback because they want a piece, or because some systemd tentacle got up the anal cavity of something they rely on for their base install.