Poettering: The Biggest Myths

Posted Jan 27, 2013 12:35 UTC (Sun) by smurf (subscriber, #17840)
In reply to: Poettering: The Biggest Myths by prometheanfire
Parent article: Poettering: The Biggest Myths

What's "passive aggressive" about this?

Why should systemd eschew a whole lot of features of Linux which are simply not available elsewhere? More so if he cannot do half the ob he set out to do without them?

If you think he's wrong, and if you think something like systemd would be way cool to have on *BSD, write it yourself. I doubt that it'd be possible without kernel changes; systemd wasn't either.

NB: eudev is a rather bad example. I still fail to see which problem the eudev fork is supposed to solve.

Poettering: The Biggest Myths

Posted Jan 27, 2013 23:17 UTC (Sun) by ewan (guest, #5533) [Link] (3 responses)

Indeed, some ideas in systemd are similar to things done in Apple's launchd - you don't need cross platform code or a friendly 'upstream' to be able to nick good ideas from where ever you find them.

Poettering: The Biggest Myths

Posted Jan 28, 2013 5:21 UTC (Mon) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (2 responses)

Actually, launchd is under the Apache licence -- why didn't Red Hat just take it? (There are claims that Ubuntu considered launchd in 2006 and rejected it because of its licence -- APSL at that time. Apple subsequently relicensed it.)

Interestingly, one complaint about launchd I see from a Unix-loving mac user sounds exactly like some of the systemd complaints here:

Reasonable people can argue the technical merits of launchd, and I think a case can be made for improving the original init system. However, I have a deeper philosophical problem with all the functionality that has been rolled into it: One of the core principles of Unix programing is do one thing and do it well. Another is keep things as simple as possible. From that perspective, launchd tries to do too many things, creating needless risk and complexity. Apple sees launchd as a natural improvement to traditional Unix; I view it as an anti-Unix monolith.

Poettering: The Biggest Myths

Posted Jan 28, 2013 5:40 UTC (Mon) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (1 responses)

In a way they did take it, not the implementation but certainly the good ideas. They did research other systems including Solaris SMF and launchd as well as Upstart before picking out the best of all of them before implementing it the Linux way.

Poettering: The Biggest Myths

Posted Jan 28, 2013 19:34 UTC (Mon) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

Mentioning launchd is a good way to make me feel better about systemd. At least systemd has some kind of useful documentation. launchd leaves many aspects and values of its baroque xml completely undefined.