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Systemd-Free Devuan Announces Its First Stable Release Candidate 'Jessie' 1.0.0 (devuan.org)
Long-time reader jaromil writes: Devuan 1.0.0-RC is announced, following its beta 2 release last year. The Debian fork that spawned over systemd controversy is reaching stability and plans long-term support. Devuan deploys an innovative continuous integration setup: with fallback on Debian packages, it overlays its own modifications and then uses the merged source repository to ship images for 11 ARM targets, a desktop and minimal live, vagrant and qemu virtual machines and the classic installer isos. The release announcement contains several links to projects that have already adopted this distribution as a base OS.
"Dear Init Freedom Lovers," begins the announcement, "Once again the Veteran Unix Admins salute you!" It points out that Devuan "can be adopted as a flawless upgrade path from both Debian Wheezy and Jessie. This is a main goal for the Devuan Jessie stable release and has proven to be a very stable operation every time it has been performed. "
"Dear Init Freedom Lovers," begins the announcement, "Once again the Veteran Unix Admins salute you!" It points out that Devuan "can be adopted as a flawless upgrade path from both Debian Wheezy and Jessie. This is a main goal for the Devuan Jessie stable release and has proven to be a very stable operation every time it has been performed. "
I only care when I have to debug my more custom setups. Then I really hate systemd, as well as dbus. I would be surprised if anyone "really liked" it, except the original author. Most people are like "whatever, I just want X and pulseaudio to start". I, as a system developer, have built products around systemd because the product architect insisted on it. I was like "whatever, your funeral".
All my authoritative DNS servers are running custom builds (not BIND) and require custom start-up scripts for the chroot and health monitoring.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I was OK with systemd from the start, when it didn't get in my way. I even use it with direvent for automatically processing documents whenever they are updated. But lately, I've been having strange-to-diagnose errors on boot with certain USB peripherals, and I really don't enjoy wasting time looking up fixes. systemd in Debian Jessie makes it hard to recover from a boot problem, so I'm going to look at Devuan. Now, I don't expect Devuan to be a suitable replacement, but I'm going to try it nonetheless.
Most Linux users don't have a strong opinion on systemd either way,
Maybe not on slashdot, but you will probably find that people over at soylentnews have a different opinion. The systemd issue was a contributing factor to the creation of soylentnews.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
Real world example:
https://www.digitalocean.com/c...
This howto tells you to disable firewalld and enable the iptables service because it is easier to set up.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
> solves things that are simply not real issues.
I've managed UNIX servers for over thirty years, and systemd config files are a hell of a lot easier to manage than complicated shell scripts. I now manage servers with Puppet scripts, and the first time I added a custom systemd start-up daemon, I thought I was doing something wrong since it was so simple. It just worked.
The real problem with systemd is that Poettering has no experience managing servers so he just doesn't grok the importance of logging. Several times most months, I have a problem that would be trivial to fix if systemd didn't swallow the log message. We leave SELinux enabled on servers so we often make mistakes that break things, and systemd makes it hard as hell sometimes to troubleshoot. We often have to resort to using strace and looking through thousands and thousands of lines of output to try to find the problem that would have only taken a simple "tail /var/log/messages" pre-systemd.
Nice example, but I've noticed the guys working for me just can't grasp the concept of this:
systemctl start openvpn@server.service
The @ sign? server? .service? You can't use tab completion to find the name of the service like you can with /etc/init.d/something. Plus, it's confusing that Poettering decided to call the system systemd while the command name is systemctl. We use four different Linux distributions and six other UNIXes, so that small inconsistency turns into a big thing.
Actually, Linux does reflect the personality of Linus. It's a precisionist and a correction freak. And the error messages can be a bit abusive. Fortunately, few people directly interact with the kernel, and for the kernel those are benefits. Even the error messages, because they are short, pithy, and relatively predictable.
The problem is when you say "asshole" you are painting with a broad brush that includes many different characteristics, some of which would be damaging and others of which are beneficial. Linux happens to be generally beneficial in his position. I wouldn't want him writing user interfaces. And I'd be dubious about him writing end-user documentation.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
But if it starts becoming a required component for turning up the volume, that is clearly a sign of poor design.
Systemd's integration into more than just init is a fundamental result of a singular problem that has been facing all operating systems for about 15 years now: Hot plugging. Hot plugged devices need to be handled in almost exactly the same way as non-hot swapped devices during boot, so it makes sense to use the same code path for both processes. This effectively means that your init system needs to also handle pretty much every type of device that can be hot plugged. This includes: any and all USB devices, large parts of the audio sub-system, network devices, damn near everything these days. By definition, the software that handles this needs to underly everything except the kernel. Since the kernel does not deal with this (by design), something else has to. Prior to SystemD, the various methods for handling it were a complex jumble of incompatible broken-ness.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Spot on. All that's needed to confirm it is to look at Lennert's blog where he states most of the things above as his goals. He is not shy in saying that he wants to recreate linux HIS way and the rest can just go jump. If he listened to others and was a bit more patient in testing before getting things out the door that may not even be a bad thing, and it's probably fine for desktops. It kind of sucks for servers though when software depends on things working in the same sort of way they did a couple of years ago and where getting hung up on boot is a hassle for a lot of people instead of a single desktop user.