Re: upstart: please update to latest upstream version [LWN.net]

Re: upstart: please update to latest upstream version

Posted Mar 1, 2012 23:03 UTC (Thu) by alecs1 (guest, #46699)
In reply to: Re: upstart: please update to latest upstream version by dgm
Parent article: Re: upstart: please update to latest upstream version

Actually, I'm now running with SystemD on Debian, (I hope it didn't get broken again by an update since I last rebooted), so I don't quite understand what that thread is about. What context am I missing? If they already got it to work (with the old SysV scripts and whatever), what's the big fuss about it? I wouldn't worry too much about neglecting SysV, and instead concentrate on getting the best from what I already have. The way it seems, SysV is going to stay in the same incarnation for many years, with OSes moving slower than Linux. Should Linux fail, moving some scripts back to SysV is going to be on of the easier parts Debian has to do.

And yes, I agree Debian is more of a software distributor than developer organization, and I'm starting to be less and less happy with this. It's not fun when even Windows has KDE4 releases half a year earlier, Fedora has SystemD some 8 months earlier, Ubuntu users experiment with Unity and latest minute Mesa etc. I get so disconnected with upstream, when I'd actually like to give some feedback and report bugs.

(Log in to post comments)

Re: upstart: please update to latest upstream version

Posted Mar 2, 2012 20:36 UTC (Fri) by xtifr (subscriber, #143) [Link]

Um, no, it's not just people who are running Kfreebsd, it's also people who want to run Kfreebsd, people who want to retain the option to run Kfreebsd, people who are working on ports of Debian to other kernels (there are several similar projects to Kfreebsd, though none is anywhere near as advanced), people who want to retain the option of using any of these other ports, and, of course, people who, for whatever reason, don't trust Lennart and/or don't feel comfortable depending on his code.

Re: upstart: please update to latest upstream version

Posted Mar 3, 2012 14:55 UTC (Sat) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

Whatever. This still doesn't mean that the vast majority of Debian users should be held back just because there are various edge cases involving non-Linux kernels which taken together amount to a very small fraction of the total userbase. After all, the main objection to systemd on Linux still seems to be »We don't like PulseAudio« – from an objective technical point of view, systemd is an improvement over SysV init on so many levels that it is difficult to find a place to start.

Maybe the way to handle this would be to make systemd the default on platforms that support it (i.e., Linux, as of now) while sticking with SysV init on those that don't. AFAICT, the main problem with this would be that packages containing system services would have to provide both systemd configuration files and SysV init-style init scripts – but in most cases it should be possible to generate an init script from a systemd configuration file when the package is constructed or installed. Considering the fact that systemd is available for Debian already, and that, given this, including systemd configuration files with system services in addition to SysV init scripts wouldn't be a mistake now, that doesn't seem to be a big thing.

The people who want to run Debian on non-Linux kernels (etc.) could then still decide whether they wanted to attempt to port systemd to their platform (possibly without Linux-specific features such as cgroups that are useful but not central to systemd's operation), implement a generic service runner for SysV init that works off systemd configuration files directly (to save themselves the trouble of generating SysV init scripts), or stay with SysV init and all its problems and limitations for eternity. This would put the responsibility of dealing with the issue where it belongs (i.e., with the minority platforms) while keeping Debian on Linux in line with what in a few years' time will very probably be the established standard on all other major Linux distributions.