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. "

Comments

Systemd!

[phantomfive]

Most Linux users don't have a strong opinion on systemd either way, because the system boots up reliably without systemd, and it also boots up reliably with systemd. Overall it's barely noticeable and doesn't matter (right now, anyway) for most users.

There are people who write startup scripts for Linux, and they tend to have a stronger opinion, because it affects them more directly. Some really like systemd, some really don't. Some (like Patrick Volkerding) are fairly neutral about the whole thing but see no pressing need to switch.

Then there are people who are system designers, who are ok with systemd as an init system, but see it as horrid when it's a platform for building an entire OS. As long as it stays as an init program, it's fine because it can be swapped out easily. But if it starts becoming a required component for turning up the volume, that is clearly a sign of poor design.

Re:Systemd!

[gweihir]

The problem here is that the systemd-people are trying an MS-like strategy to make it impossible to swap it out: They try to replace everything else they can get their hands on and they try to sabotage whatever else they can so it does not run without systemd anymore. If these were decent people and they were just providing an alternate init-system, I would have absolutely not problem with this and just ignore it. But this embrace-extend-extinguish approach is utterly evil and marks this as a hostile takeover that will benefit nobody. There are not even any good technical reasons for this. I can only guess that they want their stuff to be the one true "does everything" because of pure ego.

Re:Systemd!

[geoskd]

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.

Re:Finally

[sgage]

"This was the whole point of open source. If something is wanted then it is usually developed. If it doesn't work for some reason, support the guys who are trying to make it work rather than bitching that someone moved your cheese."

Except it wasn't wanted, and many people feel like it was rammed down their throats. It's not that it does or doesn't work (sometimes it does, sometimes it causes trouble). It's that open source is not about 'supporting the guys' who are making something you don't want, and who are making it more and more difficult to opt out.

Re:Finally

[whoever57]

Personally, I am still trying to figure out what real problem it solves.

Every claim for systemd seems to be that it solves things that are simply not real issues.

Anyone?

The one real problem it seems to solve is: how does RedHat become the company that controls the architecture of all Linux distros.

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

> 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.

Re:Finally

[thegarbz]

Debian voted to leave SysV and to pick systemd instead of Upstart. No RedHat influence.

It wasn't a free choice. The fact that Gnome3 requires systemd was a significant influence.

The choice was made long before any mention of the fictitious Gnome dependency on systemd. It IS ficticious by the way. Gnome has a dependency on one thing: something that provides a DBUS API. systemd-logind is now shipping on many systems so it made sense for Gnome to use it. Notice however Gnome is still available for all non-systemd systems, and BSD, and simply reverts to using gnome-session instead of systemd-logind. The whole dependency thing was just another out of control rage induced verbal vomit out of the echo chamber.

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about the other distros, but it's almost silly to call what Debian did a "vote." It was a 2-2 tie and was over-ruled to force a pro systemd outcome. Considering how many people develop for and use Debian and that systemd was decided based on 2 or 3 people, it's hardly worth calling it a vote.

I've used systemd about 4 years or so now (mostly from Arch). It definitely has some pros, but the thing I don't like is Pottering himself. You should see some of the YouTube videos of him where he was pointed out to be wrong and instead of talking about the technical merits of the suggestion, he attacks the man. I've read a decent amount of his writing segments on posts and things and I will admit, he is smart, but he is seriously incapable of admitting when he is wrong.

When systemd was first being developed a lot of the bug reports were around problems with system crashes that resulted in corrupted and unreadable binary logs. They were all closed as WON'T FIX and some basically said "it's your problem."

systemd unit files, I will admit, are nice and clean. But if you actually look into the code and the systemd-itself unit files and dependencies it's really a nightmare waiting to happen. I think that's one of the biggest problems. A lot of the people commenting about systemd have only used it at the surface level. It would be like buying a used car that looks nice on the outside but never looking at the engine and realizing it's all duct-taped together.