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evolution

evolution

Posted Jan 27, 2013 2:31 UTC (Sun) by larryr (guest, #4030)
In reply to: evolution by dashesy
Parent article: Poettering: The Biggest Myths

From the vacuous perspective where all usage of text files and shell scripts is equivalent, it could be speciously argued that systemd is not much more demanding of system administrators than its predecessors.


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evolution

Posted Jan 27, 2013 3:14 UTC (Sun) by nirbheek (subscriber, #54111) [Link]

All that systemd demands of system administrators is that they take some time to learn an excellent new piece of software instead of spewing a knee-jerk reaction of "get off my lawn".

At this point in time, I count Pulseaudio and systemd amongst the best pieces of software written for Linux. The no. of features that they expose to ordinary users and sysadmins is staggering—and they do this without removing features or functionality, and while maintaining near-perfect backward-compatibility. I'm shocked that no one realises how hard it is to do this, and what value these add to our ecosystem.

At this point, after dozens of blog posts by Lennart explaining systemd, if I see anyone arguing the way you are, I am compelled to conclude that they never really gave systemd a fair chance; or, worse, they're too angry at its very existence to even try that.

I feel like most of the animosity towards these projects is not because of their (perceived) lack of technical merit, but because of the abrasive personality of their creator.

evolution

Posted Jan 27, 2013 5:51 UTC (Sun) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

> I feel like most of the animosity towards these projects is not because of their (perceived) lack of technical merit, but because of the abrasive personality of their creator.

I think this happens a lot and is also an out of date assessment, Lennart may be matter of fact in a stereotypically Germanic sort of way, which rubs some people the wrong way, but seems to have matured greatly since the flamewars during the PulseAudio days 5+ years ago.

evolution

Posted Jan 27, 2013 3:24 UTC (Sun) by dashesy (subscriber, #74652) [Link]

The problem with bash scripts is that they are never simple, they are convoluted, use vague idioms to save key strokes, and it takes quite some time for sysadmins to learn them well; I think every one has stories like how she learned to double-quote all variables in if-statement (test not internal) after her hard drive was formatted because of the space in the variable and that bash silently ignored the line.

On the other hand, a simple declarative text file is certainly more elegant. New sysadmins are just lucky, older sysadmins with a good taste will be happier too, after they spend a few hours to learn some new tricks.

evolution

Posted Jan 27, 2013 5:01 UTC (Sun) by Aliasundercover (subscriber, #69009) [Link]

This is my complaint with scripts as well. Even if well written for clarity they present a hard challenge because they can do anything. I find a plain declarative configuration file easier even if it is one I don't know yet because its scope is bounded.

evolution

Posted Jan 29, 2013 7:26 UTC (Tue) by Seegras (subscriber, #20463) [Link]

"Some old-school Unix habits have persisted long past
the point that they're even remotely sane. Shell programming at any
volume above a few lines of throwaway code is one of them - it's
*nuts* and we should *stop doing it*." -- ESR on shell scripts.
http://lwn.net/Articles/527308/

ESR does not speak for me

Posted Jan 31, 2013 13:12 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

This recommendation is almost enough to make me take up shell programming again. Or sed.

ESR does not speak for me

Posted Jan 31, 2013 15:29 UTC (Thu) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]

I agree about ESR, but even a broken clock is right twice a day ;-)

evolution

Posted Jan 28, 2013 14:40 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

* Get me a list of all system services running.
* Get me their status.
* IF they are running then find me the parent PID number and any other processes that belong to the parent. Get me the last few lines of the logs for those services.
* IF it has failed to start up get me the exit code for the service and then the last few lines of the logs relevant for those processes.

All this stuff is deadly simple with systemd.

systemctl status vdsmd

for example.

This is a huge boost in productivity for system administrators to be able to have all the information in one spot.

evolution

Posted Jan 29, 2013 19:02 UTC (Tue) by dfsmith (guest, #20302) [Link]

I'm not sure I like the adverb "deadly" simple.

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