Another daemon for managing control groups [LWN.net]

Another daemon for managing control groups

Posted Dec 5, 2013 12:37 UTC (Thu) by ovitters (guest, #27950)
In reply to: Another daemon for managing control groups by tdalman
Parent article: Another daemon for managing control groups

Systemd is meant to do one thing and do it well: be the basic building block for Linux. A lot of people have other incomplete components which lack certain features which they want to mix and match with systemd. So one has as scope "basic building block" while the other has "only do X and take various other bits from Y, Z, etc".

If the thing someones building partly wants to replace systemd while not replacing systemd but wanting to reuse bits of systemd, IMO you're not doing it well. pushing complexity on another project while claiming vague things like "Unix Philosophy".

Systemd usually provides d-bus interfaces as well as various other APIs. Just implement that! Complaining that you cannot take random bits or calling this "problematic" is not helpful.

Anyway, working software: systemd has been used by many distribution for various years. Please either explain why systemd is not working or keep it to yourself.

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Another daemon for managing control groups

Posted Dec 6, 2013 23:29 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Systemd is meant to do one thing and do it well: be the basic building block for Linux.

You complain about excessive vagueness right after saying that?!

OK, I'll pile the whole OS into one process then. It does one thing and does it well: lets me use my computer!

I think it uncontroversial that that statement is an example of bad reasoning through excessive vagueness. So too is yours. It does not provide clear limits on the functionality of the program: you could pile anything in there and say, oh, it's part of being a basic building block! Why not throw out glibc and replace it with IPC calls to systemd? glibc is just a basic building block, after all!

This is clearly ludicrous -- but your description of systemd's alleged purpose would seem to encourage it. If this really is the best idea systemd's authors have of its purpose, no wonder the thing has experienced scope creep like I've never seen outside government IT projects.