Slashdot Mirror
Debian Forked Over Systemd
jaromil writes: The so called "Veteran Unix Admin" collective has announced that the fork of Debian will proceed as a result of the recent systemd controversy. The reasons put forward are not just technical; included is a letter of endorsement by Debian Developer Roger Leigh mentioning that "people rely on Debian for their jobs and businesses, their research and their hobbies. It's not a playground for such radical experimentation." The fork is called "Devuan," pronounced "DevOne." The official website has more information.
He could open for The Oneders
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
But that website is atrocious suck. Top AND bottom panes which don't move and serve no purpose other than to obscure the window? What the hell is this shit?
Yes, systemd was started as a joke. Kind of like the 16 year old who points his father's gun at a friend as a joke. Both can become all too real very quickly, and end in disaster.
Never let sysadmins name anything. They couldn't find one single marketing / PR person to test that name?
...a fork of Debian,
Such a thing is unheard of in Debian's 20-odd year history.
I wonder what the impact of this fork will be on Debian-proper.
GCC was forked successfully to egcs
XFree86 was forked successfully to xorg
FreeBSD was forked successfully to netbsd and dragondflybsd
OpenOffice was forked successfully to libreoffice
Now it's the debian's turn to be forked. Good luck to everyone.
I will stick with systemd version, which works fast and provides an actually exiting startup manager.
An exiting startup manager? Is that a less destructive alternative to the HCF (Halt and Catch Fire) instruction?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Then just call it DevOne and be done with it. Stop with the words play and the phonetic cuteness, not everyone speaks english and spanish. If I read "Devuan" I'm going to pronounce "Dév-u-en" (french).
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
the BSDs are doing it for a long time.
I was just thinking that what's holding back the Linux community is the lack of yet another distro.
2015 will surely be the year of the Linux Desktop now!
The sarcasm on this site is usually a bit more obvious. Needless to say...or maybe not...Debian is the most forked linux distribution on the planet. Its the prison b!tch of distros ;-)
I'm an admin. I don't want to be excited about startup managers. If I get excited by init, it means something is broken.
That's actually dead simple to do. Most already have one that's been stable for years.
When your career depends on things working, an "exciting" startup manager (which is what I presume you meant) is the last thing you want.
In fact, you want things to be as un-exciting as possible.
Completely unacceptable. I mean it's called "unstable" how dare it be unstable...
Ahh, the usual misrepresentation of why we oppose systemd that always shows up. Calling us haters while trying to reframe the discussion away from the real issues isn't convincing - it just adds evidence that systemd gains position by propagand and politics instead of design and implementation quality. No, you are not going to scare us away form linux. Some may retreat to FreeBSD, which is fine (it's a good OS). The rest of us are going to stay with linux, even if it large parts of linux leave and become part of the systemd monoculture. We've been here before, after all, over a decade ago.
The varied technical issues with systemd are bad enough, but they have already been discussed, and are a central reason why the sysadmins ae forking Debian. Many systemd advocates try and steer discussions back to these technical issues - while denying that systemd doesn't actually work for everybody - to avoides talking about the fundamental design problems and philosophical changes that systemd forces on Linux. While it is currently popular to "move fast and break things", those of us with more experience understand the value in not breaking everything. None of this means that those that are better served by systemd shoudl stop using it! We're only angry about the attemts to force a monoculture by breaking compatability for political reasons, when there as no technical need. You know, like Microsoft does with their "not invented here" attitude.
Still, those are philosophical issues about the software itself. That is not the primary problem some of us have with systemd, which is not about technical problems, but is instead an attack on our prefered method of licencing. The systemd takeover is an attempt to separate Linux and many userspace tools from the GPL, so that software can be used under the LGPL terms instead.
What is the big difference between GPL and LGPL? Linkage. Linking to a GPL library requires you to follow certain requirements if you link against it, while the LGPL specifically allows taht usage. (k)dbus provides the workaround, by replacing what would be a normal function call into a library with a "IPC". It's slower, but so what, computers are way faster than needed. In the end, while you can still choose to release your code as GPL, if you have to use an IPC mechanism to do anything useful the license requirements that will actually apply ends up being being more like the LGPL. For a better explanation, see this post by stevel in the Gentoo forums.
Well, if I wanted to release under the LGPL, I would. What I'm not going to do is undermine my choice of license just because a bunch of embedded developers (and others) want to use what were traditionally GPL projects without having to be bound by the copyleft requirements. If this was proprietary software, you would call that kind of behavior "stealing" or "piracy".
So don't bother with claims about "faster desktops" or "easier programming". When your solution also bundles a forced monoculture ("unifying the difference betwen distributions") and contains a loophole around the licence some of us chose it is simply not an option for those of us that place "freedom" as the most important feature. /how much does JTRIG (or their equivalent) pay for these propaganda attempts, anyway? //It's a waste of money regardless, given how transparent these comments are ///some of this post is reused from a post I made on HN
Ce n'est pas une signature automatique.
Ok, I'll get on that right away.
It's worse. Pottering is paid by Microsoft to destroy the Linux community. Every. Single. Thing. he touches is crap, mostly pointless, controversial, and breaks everything. I have no idea why people don't see this.
I don't suppose someone has a good article or explanation about why the entire systemd thing is a hot issue in the first place?
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
I used to be a sys admin, but that was years ago and currently I only use Linux on the desktop. I don't suppose that someone could explain to me (or just give me a link to an explanation): what is systemd exactly, what does it change, and why do people both love and hate it so much?
Systemd is a piece of software, modular in design, monolithic in architecture. It is, on top of being a replacement for init and the init.d scripts, replaces basically everything touching kernel and whatnot. It is also a service management and monitoring framework.
It is authored by the same guy who created PulseAudio and Avahi. Think a guy with enourmous ego and the GNOME attitude ("my way, or the highway").
I've seen enough of these stories now to kind of get the feeling that it's mostly admins who hate this, and they mostly hate it because it's change and it screws up their configs. Is that right? Is there any other reason to hate it? I have no idea what the motivation is on the other side.
It takes what worked and everybody knows (mostly written in shell), and replaces it with binary blobs (binary programs, written in C).
The majority of admins (think: ex-Windows white collars) are overjoyed to have a new toy. They never knew how init worked - and now they do not have to care anymore. Because anything written in C is magically better than everything written in shell.
The minority of admins (think: *NIX guys) are royally pissed that something they were taking for granted - the total control over the system *NIX always provided - is now basically locked down and given away to some guys from interwebs about whom they never heard before. All for the sake, wait for it, that GNOME can shutdown or restart computer smoothly.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Very droll. But misses the point. Historically, Debian unstable was usually absolutely solid. Better than the stable releases of many distributions. I should know, I've run it on my desktop(s) for the last 14 years. I've had maybe two minor issues in that entire time. Its quality has plummeted in recent months as all this "modern" stuff has been jammed in without regard to proper backward compatibility.
You might this this is amusing. I'm upset that the distribution I've spent the last 16 years working on has been subverted by developers pushing software with major design and implementation issues, and no formal specifications for its many interfaces. For something which aims to become the base of all Linux systems, its current form is pretty amateur, and its lack of attention to detail in breaking existing installs on upgrade in various different ways is breathtaking. This is largely down to the difference in attitude between the older developers such as myself who spent huge amounts of time testing things worked on all sorts of different configurations, and the systemd crowd who simply tell you you're doing things the wrong way and must change, even if you've got a configuration which was supported for the last decade by Debian. The big change here is that systemd has broken compatibility with Debian's past supported configurations by not caring to support the full range of configurations the old sysv-rc/initscripts setup did; and its maintainers did not spend the necessary effort to ensure these setups were migrated and supported properly.
systemd is, first, a new init system for Linux, to replace sysv init.
Additionally, it brings a host of companion daemons: logging (journald), a session manager (logind) and a bunch of others.
systemd and it's companions offer a host of functionality and a number of software pieces are becoming to depend on it, to the point you "can't" run a fully functional Gnome3 without using systemd as init (it needs the session management functionally of logind, for example).
The major distributions have adopted systemd as default init system: Fedora, RHEL, SuSE, Debian and Arch. Ubuntu hasn't changed yet but they have announced they will follow Debian in the future.
There is a number of people who dislike it for many reasons, which are hard to summarize because many of the people dislike it for false reasons and only some actually make valid and constructive critiques.
Eg, many people claim it's monolithic. In fact, it's made of ~100 daemons and applications and the init process isn't that big. Much much smaller than the Linux kernel itself, which a big monolithic kernel.
Many peole dislike being "forced" to use because the major distributions are adopting it and major projects like Gnome are becoming dependent (with KDE talking about it too).
I use "" in "can't" and "forced" because it's not strictly true. While a lot of people whine and hate in slashdot, a small number of people have been putting their code where their mouth is and working on alternatives.
Eg, there's a systemd-shim package in Debian which actually allows you to run Gnome3 very nicely without using systemd as init, by providing the necessary systemd features.
Ubuntu also moved to systemd because everyone was moving to systemd. Before that, Ubuntu has their own init system called Upstart, and there was much debate in Debian on whether to use systemd or Upstart.
Of course, in the end, even people wanting sysvinit are obviously doing something wrong because they're not using sysvinit properly. Sysvinit has a daemon manager built into it yet it's only used for one daemon typically (getty).
Instead, we abuse it to run shell scripts that barely replicate that functionality that is already built into sysvinit. I mean, init monitors the processes it runs, restarts them as necessary, and if they fail by restarting too quickly, init waits 5 minutes before trying again. Which his what daemon management is.
Pottering doesn't work for MSFT, he works for the 3 letter agencies. Considering that MSFT would probably be a step up on the trust scale. Where does Pottering get his money? Red Hat...okay so where does RH get THEIR money? NSA,DoD, FBI,CIA, DoJ, something like 85% of their income is from .Gov institutions, most in the Intelligence community. if the 3 letter agencies quit buying RHEL tomorrow that company would be on the ropes.
So call me paranoid but I can't really blame anybody for not wanting something controlled by a company that is so tied to the spooks, after Snowden its just common sense.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
From a Linux Journal article by Ian Murdock in 1994:
As the Debian developers create their pieces, they follow strict guidelines for constructing and maintaining these pieces, called packages. Because these guidelines are followed, each package can be dropped into the system independently without damaging or interfering with programs from other packages. By working with a set of consistent rules and with identical tools, the volunteers can and do create a truly modular system.
Nuff said.
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If RedHat now = "The Man" then I think we can finally declare, Linux has won. Linux has taken over the world. Long Live Linus!
http://img.photobucket.com/alb...
Historically, Debian unstable was usually absolutely solid.
Except for all the major changes it goes through. The introduction of udev, change to 2.2 and 2.4 kernels, all of those broke for me (though switching to 3.0 was fine but I think that was more of a marketing move than a major version change). Then there's application level problems such as config utilities breaking things like Apache when it jumped a major version.
The system is labelled as unstable. If it's stable it is a bonus. What you *think* it should be is irrelevant, it is provided without any guarantee to be bug free, or even a guarantee that it will boot.
Um, what I think it should be is entirely relevant. I was primarily responsible for maintaining sysvinit and the initscripts from squeeze through to the wheezy release and after, doing the testing and providing the guarantee that it would boot. I was the one who did the testing before uploading. Different VMs, different upgrade scenarios, bare metal on different architectures, Linux, kFreeBSD and HURD kernels. If I'd screwed up, people would have had unbootable systems and come shouting. The quality bar was higher then and we did pretty thorough testing; I'd like to think we did a pretty good job. I certainly was never responsible for systems becoming unbootable on upgrade.
Some people dislike systemd because they can see where it is headed. Here is your sign.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Debian devs are feminists and SJWs, they like change for the sake of change and to defeat "the man". They care nothing for "white male tears" even though most of them are that.
Debian excludes game due to author's views on women.
A DFSG complaint opensource casino video game was
recently posted to the debian bug tracker as a request
for packaging, as is the standard method for pursuing
such things in debian.
The bug was quickly closed, tagged as "won't fix"
The reason given by one of the debian developers
alluded to the author's opinion on women:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bi...
The piece of software in question is licensed
under the GPL and is one of the only of it's
kind for linux (ascii-art console slot machine software)
Debian packages many ascii-art / text console
video games of similar quality.
Is professing inclusive social views now a hard requirement
for being allowed to contribute to free software projects?
#gamergate #geekfeminism
RPC allows proprietary software to leverage the functionality of your GPL software, which might go against your intent, as RPC becomes the de facto interface of increasing number of components...
Honestly, I don't buy into the whole non-GPL can't link GPL argument in the first place.
Suppose I were to tell you to grab your copy of the 3rd paperback printing of Game of Thrones and look at the second sentence on page 320. Does posting that sentence make this post a violation of GRRM's copyright? Of course not - I didn't copy anything in his book - simply mentioning that it exists and that it contains a page 320 in no way makes this post a derivative work.
Well, when you link a binary to a shared object, all you do is write a bunch of cross references saying that this function call should be replaced with an address associated with this symbol. Then a linker will replace those references when your code is loaded. None of this involves copying anything. Assuming the shared object is in RAM already being used by something else, your OS isn't even copying the GPL code at all when this happens, but even if a copy were made it is an unmodified copy of the shared object which isn't being redistributed - ie it is permitted by the GPL.
Sure, everybody says that you can't link non-GPL code to GPL code, but I am not convinced that a court is certain to uphold this. I could see issues if you try to bundle GPL and non-GPL software into a single larger work, but if you distribute the non-GPL stuff without the GPL content that problem goes away.
Meh Linux is buttfucked on the desktop anyway friend. I run a PC shop and am running the latest Windows 10 build on a 2011 AMD netbook, the weakest thing I have ATM. The verdict? Its faster than Windows 7 across the board and even with every driver running in compatibility mode this thing is WAAAAY faster than a fresh Ubuntu install on nicer hardware, and that isn't even a clean install but an upgrade! If the rumors are true, and I'm betting they are, that Nadella is gonna sell Windows 10 Home for $30 a pop just to get rid of the Win7/XP installs? Then give it up Chuck, only the hardcore GNUs are gonna care, everybody else will just spend the $30 and call it a day.
I spent nearly 5 years buying the bullshit and waiting for Linux to get better....never did. still had "update foo broke my drivers" still had hell trying to get Linux to do simple tasks like video acceleration that Windows has been doing since 2005, as a Linux server admin friend who went with a Macbook after Linux had fucked his install one time too many says "Linux never gets better, only different" and he's right and its guys like Pottering that are the cause. things getting stable, shit starting to work? Well fuck that we'll rip it out and start from scratch! KDE 4, Gnome 3, Pulse, every time shit actually starts getting solid it never fails, its time to rip everything out and go back to square 1. its like they say "ZOMFG we might have to sit around fixing bugs, fuck that! We'll start fresh and be all cool and shit!" and here they go, right back to square one.
Meanwhile I ran a Win2K workstation for 10 years without a crash, last I heard my XP X64 workstation is still purring with the guy that bought it, and my Win 7 has been running since Aug 09 without a single hiccup, despite me changing damned near every single piece out, all it needed was a single Internet activation when I swapped boards.
So let 'em fight over systemd I say, I'm out. I'm tired of the lies, the excuses, the alpha quality being handed off as RTM, its a bunch of buggy beta bullshit. They just better hope the rumor about Nadella doing to servers what he is doing to desktops, with single licenses at sane prices is bs, because if that is the case? yeah good luck Linux, I have a feeling the numbers will drop like a stone!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
And if you were then you were not to blame in any case. Not until the change was made to Debian stable.
I appreciate that you put that much effort into your work. The world could do with many more developers like you, but the fact remains Debian unstable is what it says on the box, and if you have a problem with it then sure file bug reports, but don't go somewhere and complain about how your "stable" system suddenly had an issue.
It reminds me about people who ran early betas of Windows 7 and complained about incompatibilities and such. People like you put the effort in, but the unstable releases are acknowledgements that often things don't go quite according to plan, often there are edge cases for which no one can test every scenario, and to allow people to use it more widely to ensure that the above problems are caught before someone declares a system stable.
As a side note, kudos to you. Debian was one of the few distros I have used where I have never had the need to touch an init script.
Ubuntu also moved to systemd because everyone was moving to systemd. Before that, Ubuntu has their own init system called Upstart, and there was much debate in Debian on whether to use systemd or Upstart.
It's my understanding that there was an attempt to affect the voting by limiting who had the ability to vote, simply because one of the lead developers was a prominent Upstart supporter. One interesting reference is here, though this is not the source I read about the vote manipulation from.
That said, I'm not overly familiar with how Debian elections are carried out. I only know what I came across in the last couple weeks when I was trying to get a grip on why major distributions were going so solidly with systemd, given issues that so many have found in the package. The trick to remember is that systemd is not the only solution to any {real|perceived} issues that sysvinit may have: There's also openrc and Upstart, to name two other alternatives, and they each have different solutions to bring to the table. Part of what made Linux what it is is the ability to choose what you want in your distro, to determine what you think is really "broken" and what the solution should be.
Honestly, I started getting migraines trying to wade through all the political crap. Proponents of systemd started to sound like American politicians (Democrat or Republican, take your pick; they both tell lies and break promises). It's mind-numbing, which I think is the point. I couldn't find a distro without systemd at all (this was a couple weeks ago, before I head of Devuan) so I wiped my Linux (Fedora) box and put FreeBSD on it.
Yeah, I'll have to learn how to deal with 'ports', but I won't have to deal with the nightmare that appears to be systemd.
When politicians are involved, everyone loses.
Ok so reading the slides they're planning on doing network management (byebye NetworkManager), Local DNS cache (yes please), mDNS responder, LLMNR responder, DNSSEC verification, NTP, sandboxing services and applications, OS/App/Container image formats, stateless systems, atomic node initialisations and updates and more. That is freaking awesome. Not only does it bring Linux distributions closer together.. it also takes the distributions as a whole to a new level. Instead of a kernel + some packages the future will bring us a true (GNU/)Linux/systemd operating system. I can understand this may seem scary to some but personally I really think this is awesome.
But we already have that available. It's called OSX.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
BS my ass, the fact is everyone non-technical has is computer riddled of virus and windows suck balls. User or no user stupidity the end result is pretty much the same.
At this point, some people will somewhat rightfully complain.
What does the init system have to do with this? Why can't we do this with sysv init? And the answer is "technically, no reason".
It just so happens that the only piece of software that currently can do this job properly (systemd-logind) is part of the systemd project and has a dependency on systemd(-init).
But at the same time, that dependency exists simply because no other project implements the necessary features. Once someone creates a capable alternative, the dependency will tend to disapear.
And this is already happening: there is still no credible alternative to systemd-logind, but there is a credible alternative to run systemd-logind without using systemd as init.
Why do they need to reimplement all these things?
I use unbound for DNS, and it's great. It provides caching, DNSSEC, and more. It's a mature, stable project. Why rewrite it?
Same with NTP. Why do they need to sprinkle SysD dust on it? We already have NTP.
I hate NetworkManager, and I'm sure I'll hate whatever SysD project rewrites it. My desktop has a static place in the network. I don't need some bloatware screwing with all my network settings and crashing all the time.
This is one thing I don't like about systemd. All the selling points (e.g. almost everything at http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/why.html) seem to be either:
Another troubling thing is that I've never seen a good description of what "the systemd way" is, or what the grand vision is. It seems to be nebulous, constantly shifting, and constantly expanding with no clear boundaries.