Well, there are big difference...

Posted Nov 24, 2011 11:34 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313)
In reply to: Well, there are big difference... by dlang
Parent article: That newfangled Journal thing

by the way, a note on the number of users and the "most machines don't need this feature argument"

If you count by the number of people at a keyboard of a machine you may be right.

but when you start considering server farms where the admin to system ratio is commonly well over 100 servers per admin, you would get very different numbers.

embedded systems are in many ways far more like servers than desktops. They have skilled admins managing the software and all the non-trivial configurations on the devices (either at the factory, or through 'firmware updates'

'winning the desktop' while loosing servers and embedded devices would not be a overall win.

to post comments

Well, there are big difference...

Posted Nov 24, 2011 14:23 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

but when you start considering server farms where the admin to system ratio is commonly well over 100 servers per admin, you would get very different numbers.

Sure. For example you can get... zero. We have totally different systems on desktop and on servers here (they only share few common packages like glibc and libstdc++ to simplify testing). It does not matter at all what the servers are using because desktops are using totally different Linux. I'm pretty sure we are not alone.

embedded systems are in many ways far more like servers than desktops. They have skilled admins managing the software and all the non-trivial configurations on the devices (either at the factory, or through 'firmware updates'

Again: there are many different types of embedded systems and they use different packages. What they usually don't use are desktop-based distributions.

'winning the desktop' while loosing servers and embedded devices would not be a overall win.

Why not? Apple ceased to produce their rack-mountable servers and they use quite different set of programs on their iPad and Macbook - and still is fine AFAICS.

Sure, we should not forget servers, routers and other Linux-based machinery, but I fail to see why the desktop-oriented distribution should be driven by the needs of server or an embedded system.

I think this one thing which Ubuntu did right (and Fedora followed): distribution's work is selection first and foremost. It must work fine in the default install. If you want to serve a different niche - you can create a spin-off. Journald does not propose to remove support of syslogd for the time being and I'm pretty sure such support will only be considered in the future if Journald will be good enough for most uses, not just for desktop.

As for "who's the most numerous"... it's silly question: RedHat's accounting department knows the numbers, I'm pretty sure needs of the most important customers will be taken into account when the fate of journald will be determined.