Which init system for Debian?
Which init system for Debian?
Posted Nov 13, 2013 19:28 UTC (Wed) by smurf (subscriber, #17840)In reply to: Which init system for Debian? by ThinkRob
Parent article: Which init system for Debian?
I don't want systemd because it's new and cool. I want it because with systemd I can forget about complex nonsense in the stuff I do care about.
For instance, my daemon process doesn't have to go through the rigmarole of double-forking, detaching from the terminal, cleaning up its environment, etc., any more. This is easy to get wrong. Esp. when a library writes its error messages to STDERR … which daemonizing redirets to /dev/null. Ouch.
I can use journalctl. That gives me the output I care about in exactly one place. This makes my job of debugging programs easier. This makes for more reliable programs. This benefits "normal" users.
I can restart a socket-activated process seamlessly. This benefits normal users because their system is no longer in a semi-reliable in-between state when they upgrade it.
I can give daemons their own /tmp, restrict them from looking at users' /home, and whatnot. Granted that this can be done with some sort of helper program, but with systemd's config files this sort of thing is so simple that it's actually going to be used. (And it's faster.)
And so on.
Posted Nov 13, 2013 20:27 UTC (Wed)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
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I run into this all the time because most of our locally generated software is perl written by people who's primary job isn't systems programming so I have to try and fix it in shell using nohup and shell job control and whatnot, getting scripts to set their $0 so that I can use pidof to identify and restart them (instead of having everything be /usr/bin/perl). All of this hoop-jumpery doesn't feel like well thought through design, it feels hacky and hokey whereas systemd seems well thought through, well documented and thorough. You can read through the design philosophy and process in the blog posts at 0pointer.de and judge whether they make sense to you, they certainly made sense to me and seem an improvement on daemontools or runit in every way.
Posted Nov 19, 2013 5:57 UTC (Tue)
by ThinkRob (guest, #64513)
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That's kinda my point. You're a power user. You write your own init scripts.
Most users don't. Most probably never will.
For them, it doesn't really matter if their distros' maintainers had to jump through a bunch of hoops to make sysvinit work.
I'm glad you like systemd. It's got a lot of cool tech in it, and while I'm not sold on it being made a key part of peoples' security strategies, I do think it's good at handling a lot of, well, system tasks. But I'm also not a normal user, so I'm with you in that segment of the community that likes things that offer neat features to developers and sysadmins. I just don't think that my views are majority opinions, that's all.
Posted Nov 19, 2013 9:17 UTC (Tue)
by smurf (subscriber, #17840)
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I don't. Not any more. And that's a good thing.
I just fail to see any advantage of staying with sysV, for any use case. Other than "hey diversity" or "hey kFreeBSD/Hurd", both of which I frankly do not care about at all, because (a) I propose to be diverse in the areas that actually matter to users and their use cases instead of infrastructure that makes programs more difficult to install and maintain, and (b) the number of kFreeBSD or Debian/Hurd users is, frankly, so small that forcing a suboptimal init system on the rest of Debian ultimately wastes more man-hours than the productive uptime of all these systems combined. :-P
Seriously, also shipping rudimentary sysV init scripts for these systems is not going to be a problem. Or take much effort. If any.
Which init system for Debian?
Which init system for Debian?
> That's kinda my point. You're a power user. You write your own init scripts.
Which init system for Debian?