Myths not debunked but confirmed

Posted Jan 28, 2013 2:21 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313)
In reply to: Myths not debunked but confirmed by alan
Parent article: Poettering: The Biggest Myths

actually, very few people are saying that systemd should not exist.

What they are upset about is the push to make systemd mandatory (as we saw by the statements about how ubuntu is fragmenting linux by not switching to systemd)

RHEL is the 800 pound gorilla distro, if it does something, it impacts all other distros.

At this point we don't _know_ that RHEL is going to switch to systemd in the next release but the fact that systemd is being pushed by RedHat employees says that it's a real possibility.

I think it's a mistake to do so, RHEL customers have lots of sysadmins with lots of experience with sysV init, and many of those customers have lots of non-linux systems. They also have lots of old RHEL systems (many of them are still running RHEL4 and older)

Making the new RHEL systems have a completely different init system than the rest of the systems they run is not going to lead to happy admins, and taking the attitude that any admins who don't embrace having to re-learn the init system (in addition to all the other things they have to be learning to keep up) are fools who should loose their jobs is not going to improve things.

Many of these admins are working way over 40 hours/week as it is, and have a list of things they want to do (including many that are really rather important) that they don't have time to do that's months, if not years long.

it's not that they aren't willing to learn, it's that they don't see the value of disrupting this particular core piece and having to track multiple ways of doing the same thing, and remember to check which way the box they are logged into at the moment does things.

In many ways, this parallels the Gnome complaints. It really doesn't matter if the new way is better, the fact that it's so different, and therefor disruptive is a large part of the problem

Myths not debunked but confirmed

Posted Jan 28, 2013 2:39 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

As you been informed with authoritative sources several times, we do know that RHEL is going to switch to systemd and btw, the switch is not from sys v but from upstart and both of them have sysv init compatibility and that weakens your arguments drastically.

Myths not debunked but confirmed

Posted Jan 28, 2013 12:37 UTC (Mon) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (15 responses)

systemd offers a high degree of backward compatibility. If you want to use SysV style init scripts, nothing will stop you. The service(8) utility still works the way it always did on RHEL, as does /dev/initctl. And even if you use these legacy tools and interfaces, you still get new features such as service management with cgroups. If this isn't enough for the people you describe, then I indeed think that they should get another job. Preferably one where they get paid for pointless whining.

Myths not debunked but confirmed

Posted Jan 28, 2013 19:51 UTC (Mon) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (14 responses)

Prophecy of blaming the victim is fulfilled.

Myths not debunked but confirmed

Posted Jan 28, 2013 20:34 UTC (Mon) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (13 responses)

Speaking of victims, have you stopped beating your wife yet?

Myths not debunked but confirmed

Posted Jan 29, 2013 8:13 UTC (Tue) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (12 responses)

Always raising the bar, aren't you.

Myths not debunked but confirmed

Posted Jan 29, 2013 12:05 UTC (Tue) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (11 responses)

OK, since you obviously didn't get it: I don't actually think you're beating your wife. I was merely trying to point out that the kind of loaded language you use isn't helpful (specifically, the use of the word "victim" when there's nothing to be a victim of).

cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/loaded_question

Myths not debunked but confirmed

Posted Jan 29, 2013 20:37 UTC (Tue) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (9 responses)

No, I got it. You were making a false accusation using rude language.

The victims here are sysadmins who have to deal with a variety of systems who a new thing dumped on them.

Pro: systemd might be better for the subset of systems that use it

Con: most systems don't use it

Sysadmins have many things to learn and accomplish and not welcoming this relatively useless (to them) change is not a sign of incompetence but rather sanity.

That doesn't mean that they should get to dictate how the systems are architected, but they are the ones who get dumped on by this particular set of changes.

So yes, you were blaming the victims. Don't do that.

Myths not debunked but confirmed

Posted Jan 29, 2013 21:38 UTC (Tue) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link]

Why complain about wording and also say sysadmins are victims? I'm looking forward to RHEL7!

Myths not debunked but confirmed

Posted Jan 29, 2013 22:12 UTC (Tue) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (1 responses)

As evidenced by many comments here and elsewhere, systemd is *not* a relatively useless change, most people welcome it because it's easier to configure, more reliable and more featureful than what came before it. So please stop spreading this kind of FUD. Systemd makes life easier for most people, not harder, which is why most significant distros adopted it by now.

And besides, most systems don't use SysVinit either, and even those who do often bear no resemblance to each other as pretty much everything is done by system-specific scripts. The introduction of systemd actually led to an *increase* in uniformity as distros share most of the configuration files.

Myths not debunked but confirmed

Posted Jan 30, 2013 4:56 UTC (Wed) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

So now you chop and change as well.

Every response has been an exercise in mischaracterization.

Myths not debunked but confirmed

Posted Jan 29, 2013 22:15 UTC (Tue) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (5 responses)

>> Sysadmins have many things to learn and accomplish and not welcoming
>> this relatively useless (to them) change is not a sign of
>> incompetence but rather sanity.

If you truly think systemd is "relatively useless" for sysadmins, you should re-read this discussion.

Sysadmins need to be able to correctly and efficiently deal with failure situations. Once you use "systemctl status" and see instantly what the problem is, as opposed to grepping through heaps of ps and syslog output, you will not want to go back.

A more obscure, yet incredibly useful, feature of systemd is to start services in a consistent environment. No root login whose strange environment settings can contaminate the daemon and render its messages useless. No tty which can randomly block or vanish. No job control that can block your program or send it strange signals. And so on.

Myths not debunked but confirmed

Posted Jan 30, 2013 4:57 UTC (Wed) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (4 responses)

If you're a sysadmin of a monoculture, sure it will eventually be useful.

AFAICT, those people are now called "devops", and they may love it.

Myths not debunked but confirmed

Posted Jan 30, 2013 7:19 UTC (Wed) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (3 responses)

Translation: "Incremental progress is bad."

You seem not to notice that you contradict yourself.

Oh well.

Myths not debunked but confirmed

Posted Jan 30, 2013 12:16 UTC (Wed) by mgb (guest, #3226) [Link] (2 responses)

@smurf - The words which k8to wrote have no need of your "translation".

Incremental progress is good.

systemd is bad because its poor design and premature optimization create unnecessary coupling which inhibits incremental progress across a critical mass of system software.

Nevertheless it appears that the systemd problem has been solved. Fedora and Redhat and some other distros have been borged but Debian and Ubuntu and many other distros have stood firm.

FLOSS will simply evolve to leave the systemd-limited distros behind. Debian and Ubuntu and other distros will offer parallel boot options and cgroups options to their users without compromising FLOSS evolution.

Myths not debunked but confirmed

Posted Jan 30, 2013 13:28 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

FLOSS will simply evolve to leave the systemd-limited distros behind.

I think that, given time, the problem will take care of itself since nobody will be able to come up with anything that is both enough of a significant improvement on System V init to get System V init anywhere near what systemd does even today, compatible with tradition enough so the die-hard System V init fans won't complain, and gets traction in enough distributions so people will actually be interested. (The ones which have subscribed to systemd already aren't going back unless whatever the System V init camp has to propose is really a lot better than systemd, which would be quite surprising.) This is very unlikely to actually happen since historically the distributions didn't even seem to be able to agree on a standard for init scripts, let alone all of System V init or indeed an evolutionarily improved System V init.

In the meantime, systemd will improve even further and, with the major Linux distributions behind it, will become even more compelling. In effect, System V init will leave systemd behind in exactly the way that CVS left Git behind.

Feel free to prove me wrong.

Myths not debunked but confirmed

Posted Jan 30, 2013 14:47 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

Somehow, "FLOSS will simply evolve to leave the systemd-limited distros behind." makes me think "What, like XFree86 evolved to leave the X.org-limited distros behind?"

Myths not debunked but confirmed

Posted Jan 29, 2013 20:42 UTC (Tue) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

Nevermind that the whole IDEA of loaded questions is that you ask a question and presuppose the framing is accurate in a weasely way. There was no *question* so the linguistic trick of a loaded question cannot even apply.

I made a statement which linguistically a clear thing which can be accepted or rejected by the reader. So your attempt to imply such underhanded tactics is itself underhanded. Which, if you didn't realize, is why you were being unreasonably rude.