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
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.
This recreates the correct 800x600 experience for optimum viewing. We've had 800x600 for years and years and it's well-proven and stable. There's certainly no need for all these extra resolutions to complicate things!
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
Seems clear that we've lost Debian, an operating system, to developers of a mere application, "desktop." Why do we even need operating systems? A desktop is all anyone needs... just run your servers on that!
The Admin and the Engineer
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 gratuitous use of bolding grants me insight into the developer's mindset and makes me despair for the future of this fork. Still they're just getting started, and probably slapped something together that will soon be replaced.
I'm going to start a more user friendly fork of Devuan that adds systemd back in! I'm going to call it Trayvon.
Website coming soon.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
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.
Slight correction:
NetBSD and FreeBSD were developed independently in the 90s, and mostly in parallel.
OpenBSD forked off NetBSD.
DragonflyBSD forked off FreeBSD.
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.
Of all Linux distributions, Debian was *the* first choice for running servers, but since they decided to force systemd down users throats they have lost a lot of credibility in the BOFH world. A sysadmins first concern is reliability of its systems and this was also Debian's for a very long time. Clearly the adoption of systemd is not going in this direction. It seems to me that Devuan people understood that and want to take the now deserted land of server oriented distros. Of course the meaning for Debian is they will now have a hard time to compete with the whole lot of very good desktop distributions if they don't want to lose most of their users.
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.
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.
You comment is well put. A distro that is "Debian without systemd dependencies" has a very large built-in audience right out of the gate. And that audience is technically sophisticated, with the ability to contribute. Regardless of whether or not you consider that audience a herd of Luddites (which I do not) it has both critical mass and sufficient know-how and motivation to give Devuan a fast ramp, which is the key to survival in today's crowded distro world.
rehash never needs any arguments. Check your man page.
~~
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.
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.
Of all Linux distributions, Debian was *the* first choice for running servers, but since they decided to force systemd down users throats they have lost a lot of credibility in the BOFH world. A sysadmins first concern is reliability of its systems and this was also Debian's for a very long time. Clearly the adoption of systemd is not going in this direction. It seems to me that Devuan people understood that and want to take the now deserted land of server oriented distros. Of course the meaning for Debian is they will now have a hard time to compete with the whole lot of very good desktop distributions if they don't want to lose most of their users.
Then why aren't you hearing anything from the Red Hat customer base? If anyone wants reliability it's the enterprise which is Red Hat's entire market. The fact that nothing is coming from that side tells me that this is about something else entirely where people are more concerned about the political process and symbolism than the technical merits.
Maybe there is a big demand for a very stripped down low feature server distro, but I suspect this isn't going do become a big player.
I stole this Sig
Systemd changes the way various start up and backgound processes are triggered.
The aim is to come up with something that can do more than the current init / cron et al processes in a more coherent way than at the moment, which dates back decades. Many approaches have been taken over the years, but generally try to keep the foundation of how it works the same, but make it "better". systemd throws out everything and starts over with a different approach.
The reasons why people don't like it are legion. Some because of change resistance - this manifests in many different ways. Some because of the "who" of it. They don't like source of the change. Some of the resistance has a technical foundation - the first process in the current init is very simple and everything spawns from it. With systemd, it is complex, and so the fear is that it has an increased probability of failure or instability. And linux is founded on a reputation of stability. Arguments are that it isn't very unixy - which is to have lots of small tight components that do one thing well all working together. Arguments are that having many processes spawn to do something relatively straight forward is unixy, but that doesn't automatically make it good. Arguments are that having one (main) process mediate all this stuff is better than having everything mediate itself and try to cooperate with everything else.
The difficulty with all of the arguments, is that a significant proportion of them are emotionally based, rather than technical, but all are couched in a technical setting, which makes it extremely hard to really get to grips with the real pros and cons.
I am happy to have systemd on some machines, and happy to not have it on others. With regards to this whole topic, the best bet when you see a discussion unfold is sit back with popcorn and watch either sides arguments dissolve into logical fallacy.
This signature intentionally left blank
Then why aren't you hearing anything from the Red Hat customer base?
I am. Were I to walk into the systems suite here at work and yell "yeah centos 7!" I would probably be bombarded with nerf darts. In a mean way.
Someone had to do it.
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.
Except there is plenty coming out of the RHEL customer base - we're being told to shut up. Also notice how many RHEL shops are not moving to RHEL 7 (us among them).
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
I disagree. Uselessd shows that systemd's parts are not as tightly coupled as people suppose. Just because they are all part of one umbrella project does not, in fact, mean they are tightly coupled and integrated in some sort of orwellian fashion. Uselessd proves this fact. And Uselessd is a good thing to have. Provides competition for systemd, provides a few features people want, and could pave the way for modern desktops like Gnome to run on non-linux systems such as BSD. Gnome isn't bent on having *the* "systemd" just the capabilities that systemd provides. If Uselessd can do it, so much the better.
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.
This page accidentally left blank
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...
"the whole systemd vs. sysv init is mostly an emotional one."....uhhh..you wanna rethink that Hoss?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
You know... all that code that I don't know what it does because I don't understand the problem it solves! Surely if I don't know it can't be useful, right? Who are you to have features I don't understand?! /s
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
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.
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.