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Myths not debunked but confirmed

Myths not debunked but confirmed

Posted Jan 27, 2013 19:13 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)
In reply to: Myths not debunked but confirmed by niner
Parent article: Poettering: The Biggest Myths

I read the fine article, thanks. If Upstart was not good enough, why not improve upon it instead of building their own init system? The explanation in the "debunking" is not good enough; manual dependencies might be substituted with automatic dependencies, I don't see any technical hurdles there. The general ideas behind Upstart are still good. At the same time I don't see Upstart gaining all the "features" going on to span through 69 binaries.

Debian has Upstart in testing right now, though not as the default.


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Myths not debunked but confirmed

Posted Jan 27, 2013 20:03 UTC (Sun) by Jonno (subscriber, #49613) [Link]

> If Upstart was not good enough, why not improve upon it instead of building their own init system?
They did for a few years, until they realised actually fixing some of their issues would have meant rewriting upstart from scratch, breaking compatibility with the original upstart in subtle ways. That would have been systemd in all but name anyway...

> Debian has Upstart in testing right now, though not as the default.
Yes, and just like systemd...

Myths not debunked but confirmed

Posted Jan 27, 2013 23:39 UTC (Sun) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

Systemd : Upstart : SysV-Init = Git : Subversion : CVS.

Myths not debunked but confirmed

Posted Jan 28, 2013 9:45 UTC (Mon) by danpb (subscriber, #4831) [Link]

Couldn't agree more, i've frequently used this analogy myself when talking about SystemD to people. Just like GIT there's a bit of a learning curve because of the new concepts involved, but once you're past that, you'll never want to go back to the old ways.

Myths not debunked but confirmed

Posted Jan 28, 2013 18:10 UTC (Mon) by ThinkRob (subscriber, #64513) [Link]

This would be a better analogy if CVS and Subversion were portable and Git was not, and the standard response to complaints about the complete inattention to portability were "yeah, well just use Linux because I don't want to hold Git back by making it run on obsolete OSs -- besides, you can always just keep using SVN".

Myths not debunked but confirmed

Posted Jan 28, 2013 18:44 UTC (Mon) by apoelstra (subscriber, #75205) [Link]

> This would be a better analogy if CVS and Subversion were portable and Git was not, and the standard response to complaints about the complete inattention to portability were "yeah, well just use Linux because I don't want to hold Git back by making it run on obsolete OSs -- besides, you can always just keep using SVN".

Git technically works on non-POSIX systems, but it's painfully slow. CVS and Subversion were equal-opportunity crap.

Myths not debunked but confirmed

Posted Jan 28, 2013 20:30 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

> This would be a better analogy if CVS and Subversion were portable and Git was not,

Sysvinit scripts are _NOT_ portable.

Myths not debunked but confirmed

Posted Jan 28, 2013 20:39 UTC (Mon) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]

Making systemd portable is essentially impossible (myth 16) and if it weren't, it'd be pointless (myth 13). So will you *please* stop bringing up this nonsense?

Myths not debunked but confirmed

Posted Jan 28, 2013 12:13 UTC (Mon) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]

Well, I'm not so sure the analogy is correct. Git is build on a very simple core, with cleverly simple data structures, even if the porcelain is complex. Could it be more like:

SystemD : Upstart : SysV-Init =? Emacs : Vim : ed

Myths not debunked but confirmed

Posted Jan 28, 2013 13:38 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

The main point of the analogy is that, just as Subversion is basically CVS with the most glaring problems papered over, Upstart is basically SysV-Init with the most glaring problems papered over.

On the other hand, like Git, systemd represents a completely different way of attacking the problem at hand.

Myths not debunked but confirmed

Posted Feb 2, 2013 10:04 UTC (Sat) by Kwpolska (guest, #89145) [Link]

Vim is better than Emacs, but Upstart is worse than systemd.

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