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Lennart Poettering Announces the First Systemd Conference
jones_supa writes: Lennart Poettering, the creator of the controversial init system and service manager for Linux-based operating systems has announced the first systemd conference. The systemd.conf will take place November 5-7, in Berlin, Germany. systemd developers and hackers, DevOps professionals, and Linux distribution packagers will be able to attend various workshops, as well as to collaborate with their fellow developers and plan the future of the project. Attendees will also be able to participate in an extended hackfest event, as well as numerous presentations held by important names in the systemd project, including Poettering himself.
If a startup management subsystem needs its own conference, it is doing too much.
We are systemd. Lower your MBR protection and surrender your init system. We will add your daemons, libraries, and utilities to our own. Your code will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Ah, but with every single major distro adopting it, you better quit crying and get used to it, buddy!
They changed to systemd, they can change away just as well. Oh sure, the systemd cancer has spread to many daemons, but it can be excised from them as well. (Ironically, the daemons need exorcism...)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
They will not invite someone to speak on that, but that is something I'm working on.
In brief, the good:
* Systemd makes it easier for distro maintainers to write startup scripts, which is something a lot of them wanted.
The bad:
* Poor understanding of interfaces by the lead developers.
* Poor understanding of portability by the lead developers.
* Poor understanding of separation of concerns.
* Scope creep (there is no reason Gnome should depend on systemd).
* Binary files are a symptom of idiocy......more specifically, binary/text is not something that should be decided by the init system.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
>* Scope creep (there is no reason Gnome should depend on systemd).
Gnome doesn't depend on systemd as such, but on the systemd-logind API. Until recently (perhaps it still does) it also supported the old ConsolKit API as alternative even though CK had been dead for +1½ year with no upstream bug fixing or security support, and no one bothered to maintain it anyway.
The problem seems to be that the systemd-opponents really don't understand how Open Source software works and being developed, something that requires coordination, and positive contributions with either code, documentation, or money.
Claiming that the systemd developers are incompetent and doesn't understand software development will get you nowhere. You have to employ your superior knowledge into actual competing projects in order to be taken seriously. But that is the problem isn't it? The total lack of effort by the systemd-opponents to actually create something useful.
Systemd conference -- you're going whether you want to or not.
Yeah, it'll be so terrible because... because...
Can you explain why this is a bad thing? Or is this another purely emotional "I don't like it!" tantrum?
Actually, Debian should have been forked to include systemd, not forked to exclude it!
That's the whole point of forking. You fork, do experimental stuff like integrate systemd in this fork, and then throw the fork away when it becomes clear that the idea was a dumb one.
When done sensibly like that, the source is left unaffected by experimentation that proves to be disastrous.
Debian users could have continued to use a stable, sane, reliable, trustworthy system, like they've been accustomed to for a couple of decades now.
Those who want newfangled and unproven doodads and curiosities could have used the systemd fork of Debian. When they got bored, or suffered from one failure after another, they could always limp back to Debian.
'I need you to prevent something horrible from happening in the future, Steve.' He then nodded at the TV. There was a game on and along the bottom of the screen was a stock ticker. After reading from his tablet for a moment he said, 'Jackson is gonna score on a third-down pass in a minute.'
We watched three plays and sure enough, he was right. He proceeded to call the next series exactly. 'Nice trick.' I said, 'But this broadcast must be delayed.'
'That stock ticker isn't though, is it? Check your timepiece. The market closes in ten minutes.' He then showed me the closing price for both exchanges and bought me another stout.
It must have been a wild day on Wall Street because prices were feverishly swinging up and down. But he got the final numbers, right down to the penny. 'I'm from the future.' he said.
Now you hear all sorts of crazy talk at the Z-80 Lounge. And San Francisco IS the golden cultural capital in the hearts of hippie hackers everywhere. So I figured he hacked my tablet. "You have to stop it. It's called system..." But just then, a big hand clamped over his mouth and two big guys in suits grabbed him and dragged him out so I never knew until now what he was talking about.
Sorry.
Fifty years of Yippie! 1968-2018
"(sorry, Slackware, you're a relic; Gentoo, you're impractical)"
Sorry AC , you don't get it: It doesn't matter whether 1 or 1 billion people use a distro, they are exercising their choice - their ability to choose what they want. That is the most powerful aspect of free software whether it be Gentoo, Slack, Yggdrasil (my first), *BSD or whatever.
YOU GET A FUCKING CHOICE OF WHAT OS TO PUT ON YOUR COMPUTER.
Your insinuation that FreeBSD will somehow slide into the breech to replace Linux is almost as laughable as this being the year of Linux on the Desktop.
BTW I use Gentoo quite a lot (50 odd systems) and they all have pid 1 == systemd ...
Cheers
Jon
I really don't get the fetish for text file configuration that Linux has.
Text is attractive because it's a least-common-denominator and *universal* format. However inconvenient it may be to parse and organize, you can write a reasonably simple script to do it, and you can pipe it through just about any command to transform or process it in whatever way you want. With text, you never have to worry about a black box of a file, because it's always human-readable, and thus more amenable to hacking.
The downside for log files is that text-based formats are incredibly inefficient as backing stores for any substantial amount of data. And as a configuration format, it's incredibly difficult to write front-end configuration software for scripts, although less so with regular formats like json or xml. Once the configuration is in a script, automated management of that configuration pretty much goes out the window - you're essentially committed to maintaining scripts by hand. This is not a problem for system administrators or advanced users, but horrible for normal users and GUI systems.
There are legitimate points on both sides, and which side you come down on may depend on your primary use case.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
ok, so now I'm interested. You are clearly a strong proponent of systemd (some might even say 'fanboy'). What is it about systemd that you like so much? What are the features that really help you? What inspires your advocacy?
Not really a fan boy. Actually I don't care at all what other people use as init-system. I am cool with Slackware going their own way, and I respect P. Volkerding's Linux vision, even though it isn't the same as mine.
The main reasons why I am going into the systemd debate was that I frankly was tired of all the stupid misinformation spread about it. Some of it deliberate lies, but most often it is misinformation copied from some swivel-eyed loony and then repeated again and again until people take it as truth.
My favorite example on this was the often repeated claim that Gnome had "hard dependencies on systemd" and these where "pushed/forced" into Gnome by Poettering. Just because Gnome support systemd for session management, doesn't mean it can't support an alternative too.
And in fact, Gnome did exactly that, despite that ConsolKit was dead and unsupported upstreams, they still supported it years afterwards, while pleading on various blogs and mailing lists (including Debian's) that some should either maintain CK or make an alternative. Nobody did that and the non-systemd camp can only blame themselves for that.
Perhaps one of the reasons why nobody started to make an alternative could be that so many people claimed that Gnome had hard dependencies on systemd, making it look like Gnome only cared for systemd support, so why bother. A self fulfilling prophecy.
I have been a Linux user since Slackware came on 40 floppies. I like Linux, I like the technical progress it has experienced since, and I actually remember technical discussions before year 2000 on the problems with SysVinit, and syslog and the lack of coordination of the Linux plumbing layer.
To me systemd was an answer to my prayers with what I didn't like with Linux: SysVinit (it is only simple when doing simple things, and it is only simple because it outsources complexities into daemons etc, the complexities are still there.), service management; new and inconsistent tools among each distro, and lets not forget the time wasted on grafting some service management system on top. Logging too. I had high hopes for Rsyslog when they started in 2005, and while I really respect their work, they didn't solve several of the problems they set out to solve (perhaps not incidentally many of the same problems systemd have actually solved). The reason wasn't lack of will, but total lack of coordination in Linux between userland, the OS layer (where Rsyslog belongs) and kernel.
I have always played with new tech, including ones I didn't have a need for at the moment. So when systemd came out, I actually sat down one afternoon and just started to read, and read the documentation. I then started to play around with it. It really convinced me how good systemd was, and how much potential it has.
systemd is different, and it really does require some serious studying in order to use it. You just can't wing it, even if you have loads SysVinit/Upstart experience.
There are several technical things I like about systemd and I find superior to similar solutions, especially security. But perhaps what I really like about _using_ systemd is how much the developers care for the end users. It is in the small details like awesome bash-completion, sane defaults, how everything us documented in the man-pages, there is even a manpage containing a list of all the systemd man-pages (man systemd.index ) and a reverse list of every file, config option, CLI option etc (man systemd.directives) and overview pages like "man bootup" that shows and explain the boot process. And the way they abstract away all the difficult bits into simple declarative statements that goes into structured text files. And tools like "systemd-delta" that instantly gives an overview of changed service files.
Systemd conference -- you're going whether you want to or not.
Oh for fuck sakes, you neckbeards never give up, do you?
First off, it's not a conference at all. We're just putting a few hundred people into the same room and giving talks. Just because you think that's a conference doesn't make it one. It's actually a confluence, which is something completely different that we just made up right now.
Second, nobody's forcing you to go. We're just relocating your office there for the week. If you have a problem with that, take it up with your boss. We didn't force anyone to move; we only changed the location of the building you're presently occupying.
Third, it's not one conference at all. It's just a collection of independent sessions in which a sentence is started in one session
and finished in another. But they're complete
ly independent of one another.
And why do you hate Dear Lead—er, Lennart so much? I find his work inspiring, a triumph of the will... if you will. His Kamp—er, his struggle— has been an inspiration for everyone who loves the discipline and honour of coding in der recht*cough*sorry in the Right Way. It's merely historical necessity that you unterprogrammers must be dealt with. No mercy for the dirty hippies! You cannot continue harming the purity of the FatherCode! Hail SystemD! Lebensraum for SystemD!
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.