Poettering: The Biggest Myths

Posted Jan 31, 2013 22:43 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

I was arguing against your claim that this is universal in other sorts of software.

Please remind me where I've made such claim.

Lots of software supports portability in various ways, be that compilation with different compilers (binutils, GCC), or running on different platforms (glibc, to an extent)... and huge amounts of software doesn't care e.g. what glibc or binutils or kernel version it was built with.

Lots of peripheral software is portable. The core is not. And this is exactly what I've said in the very beginning: Most popular OSes are all almost completely monolithic per this definition: Android, Busybox, BSDs. Only GNU/Linux is weird creature which includes robust and reliable monolithic part (GNU components: GCC, GLibC, binutils, coreutils, etc - they are not really supposed to be used with anything else) and loose and flaky things like sysvinit with it's plethora of weird scripts.

Take any non-Linux-based OS you want - and you'll find out that he core is built from a single repo using a single build script. Kernel, libc, some core utilities. The next ring is more portable: BSD make itself may be ported (and was, in fact, ported) to other platforms but you can not use anything else to build, say, FreeBSD's kernel or libc. The outermost ring is the most portable: these are applications which can be ported to other platforms.

But a quirk of history made Linux an exception from this rule and, surprise, surprise, this exactly where a lot problems originates: various tiny core components don't cooperate well enough and require plethora if work from distribution makers to somehow create something usable. And even then they often fail. Note that usually you can not even replace these core components: even distributions which formally offer such ability (like Debian or Gentoo) crumble and start misbehaving when you actually try to use such "freedom".

The coupling is not as tight as you suggest.

The coupling is as tight as I suggest and to me systemd looks like a try to finally bring this approach to desktop and server linux. Note that places where Linux dominates - such as routers and mobile phones - already use this approach.

P.S. It's also looks funny to me when people try to say that what systemd developers are doing is somehow against the "UNIX philosophy" when, in fact, they are doing what UNIX did from a day one and what all direct descendants of UNIX are still doing today.