Poettering: Why systemd?

Posted May 4, 2011 19:25 UTC (Wed) by aniou (guest, #74708)
In reply to: Poettering: Why systemd? by rahulsundaram
Parent article: Poettering: Why systemd?

What's wrong with tgr's article? Tell me, please. Don't wrote "I don't find real merit", tell: "They lacks merit because ...". I want arguments, not propaganda - I'm really tired of reading manipulations, like this table: http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/why.html. For example: "Conditional execution: by file existance". WTF? When it's not embedded into C-routine it's doesn't count? It's insanity. Or manipulation ("More, more, I need more red squares for init column!").

From my POV systemd is created and maintained by developers who doesn't understood and doesn't care about sysadmins work. See following thread: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2011-... - "shell scripts used for glue things together. Bueh! It's unclean, it's impure, all daemons should works in one way, OUR WAY".

Poettering: Why systemd?

Posted May 4, 2011 19:43 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (4 responses)

It appears you missed out.

https://lwn.net/Articles/441431/

I have explicitly highlighted two items already. systemd services can call shell scripts just fine if one needs it. Anyone who has bothered to try it out in a system instead of just reading blog posts can figure this out.

ExecStart=/bin/myfavshellscript

Poettering: Why systemd?

Posted May 4, 2011 21:04 UTC (Wed) by aniou (guest, #74708) [Link] (3 responses)

But... it's "wrong way"?
See: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2011-...

Poettering: Why systemd?

Posted May 4, 2011 21:06 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

It isn't the recommended way since systemd cannot babysit the process anymore but if you want to do it anyway, systemd allows that. If you want to ignore the recommendation, nothing is stopping you.

Poettering: Why systemd?

Posted May 4, 2011 21:22 UTC (Wed) by aniou (guest, #74708) [Link] (1 responses)

So... I have choice between inflexibility (someone may be stunned by this, but yes, sometimes admins needs non-standard behavior) or missing functionality and lack of support in problematic situation ("you doing it in wrong way, pal! sorry!")?

It isn't nice.

Poettering: Why systemd?

Posted May 4, 2011 21:35 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

What inflexibility? If you use shell scripts, you don't get some of the extra benefits of systemd but you are no worse off than when you are using sysvinit. The support and functionality is equivalent in that case

Poettering: Why systemd?

Posted May 4, 2011 20:42 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (3 responses)

"shell scripts used for glue things together. Bueh! It's unclean, it's impure, all daemons should works in one way, OUR WAY".

I just read that thread and nobody seems to actually say that (or anything to that effect) there.

Poettering: Why systemd?

Posted May 4, 2011 21:05 UTC (Wed) by aniou (guest, #74708) [Link] (2 responses)

You probably missed this: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2011-...

Poettering: Why systemd?

Posted May 4, 2011 21:31 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (1 responses)

No. I think there is a considerable difference between what Lennart said in that posting (»In my opinion, a database server should be able to take care of its own version upgrades on databases and not push that into distribution-specific shell code«) and what you claim he said (»Shell scripts are stupid and I am right about everything«). In fact, I happen to think that Lennart has a point.

Anyway, there are probably lots of things worth criticising about systemd that actually exist. Personally I would suggest that if you must diss Lennart and systemd it would be a much more profitable use of everybody's time to address these instead of inventing your own fictional ones.

Poettering: Why systemd?

Posted May 5, 2011 8:23 UTC (Thu) by aniou (guest, #74708) [Link]

Lennart's opinion about "valid" daemon's behavior is very, very wrong. And this is not opinion from more-or-less anonymous reader - this is opinion systemd creator and developer. Sorry, I don't see any pros from (for example) MySQL that creates missing databases itself. But I see drawbacks thats may lead to subtle and annoying situations.

Yes, of course, with simple installation, on single machine, witch typical scenarios it's doesn't matter - is databases created from script or by daemon. But uni*xes strength comes from diversity and - again - flexibility. Users and operators probably never deals with non-standard installs, but admins - yes.

Lennart's rants about separate /usr or /var ("Go to Slackware 1.0 then"), surprises with DoS via /run/user (and their "workaround", blah: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2011-...) clearly shows me that he isn't a sysadmin and don't care about different needs. But he has vision. This isn't enough for reliability and flexibility.

PS. that wasn't fictional case, I took it from official mailing-list.