The vote isn't over yet

Posted Dec 31, 2013 18:11 UTC (Tue) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129)
In reply to: This is so sad. by exadon
Parent article: Positions forming in the Debian init system discussion

The CTTE might yet come to the right conclusion. Of course it would be rather catastrophic for Debian and especially for the linux ecosystem as a whole if they didn't for the reason that you mentioned. But it hasn't come this far yet.

The vote isn't over yet

Posted Dec 31, 2013 18:21 UTC (Tue) by jubal (subscriber, #67202) [Link] (17 responses)

uh-uh, the end of the world is nigh. Calm down, man, whatever happens, the systems won't stop booting.

The vote isn't over yet

Posted Dec 31, 2013 19:33 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

The end of Debian, not world. And yeah, it's nigh.

The vote isn't over yet

Posted Jan 1, 2014 13:13 UTC (Wed) by jubal (subscriber, #67202) [Link]

Oh dear. Oh dear. Who could've thought.

The vote isn't over yet

Posted Jan 5, 2014 23:04 UTC (Sun) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (14 responses)

> Calm down, man, whatever happens, the systems won't stop booting.
Oh, I assure you Debian won't be booting on my machines if they get this wrong.

The vote isn't over yet

Posted Jan 6, 2014 12:45 UTC (Mon) by jubal (subscriber, #67202) [Link] (13 responses)

It would have more impact, have you mentioned that you stomped your both feet, I guess.

The vote isn't over yet

Posted Jan 6, 2014 23:36 UTC (Mon) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (12 responses)

So you're saying that Debian shouldn't care what its users want and do?

The vote isn't over yet

Posted Jan 7, 2014 11:02 UTC (Tue) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link] (1 responses)

> So you're saying that Debian shouldn't care what its users want and do?

Which users? It's you against the users of Debian/kfreebsd. They are users too, you know. So you're saying that Debian shouldn't care what its users want and do?

(Disclosure: I'm a Debian user and I'm in favor of systemd. But your position is... dishonest.)

The vote isn't over yet

Posted Jan 7, 2014 17:06 UTC (Tue) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

… except that the number of Debian/non-Linux users is … somewhat low … compared to those of /Linux.

The vote isn't over yet

Posted Jan 7, 2014 12:58 UTC (Tue) by jubal (subscriber, #67202) [Link] (5 responses)

What I am saying (in a rather unpleasant way, I agree) is that no matter which way the decision goes, Debian will end with a solution that's technically superior to the status quo.

Personally, I prefer upstart – but I won't scratch my disk drives with a bastard file if the tech-ctte decides to choose systemd.

The vote isn't over yet

Posted Jan 7, 2014 16:33 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

> I won't scratch my disk drives with a bastard file

Is this a saying from somewhere? I'm not familiar with the idiom (if it is one); I can guess the connotation, but if there's some subtext… :) .

The vote isn't over yet

Posted Jan 7, 2014 18:01 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

it's a tool name

http://www.reference.com/motif/reference/why-is-it-called...

The vote isn't over yet

Posted Jan 7, 2014 17:28 UTC (Tue) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (2 responses)

> What I am saying (in a rather unpleasant way, I agree) is that no matter which way the decision goes, Debian will end with a solution that's technically superior to the status quo.
I just read a nice quote from some blog[1]: “improving on ‘terrible’ doesn’t necessarily mean the result is anywhere near ‘good’”.

[1] http://grundlefleck.github.io/2013/06/23/using-scala-will...

The vote isn't over yet

Posted Jan 8, 2014 15:59 UTC (Wed) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link] (1 responses)

In your reference, what would be "terrible"?

The vote isn't over yet

Posted Jan 8, 2014 18:17 UTC (Wed) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]

sysvinit is terrible, obviously.

The vote isn't over yet

Posted Jan 9, 2014 1:31 UTC (Thu) by The_Barbarian (guest, #48152) [Link] (3 responses)

I use Debian/Linux, and I currently have no plans to use hurd or kfreebsd. But I am against systemd due to hostility to portability (though I acknowledge that other than that it is clearly superior). I wish it was otherwise.

The vote isn't over yet

Posted Jan 9, 2014 3:23 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

All things being equal, portable code is indeed better but I don't really see much of a problem here. Characterizing systemd as hostile to portability seems off the mark to me since they are just being honest about the status. systemd is fairly low level and no other operating system is going to adopt it. It takes advantage of a ton of Linux specific features and porting in this case either means reimplementing it with the same interfaces or implementing the specific features that Linux has that other kernels lack.

The vote isn't over yet

Posted Jan 9, 2014 4:14 UTC (Thu) by The_Barbarian (guest, #48152) [Link] (1 responses)

>systemd is fairly low level and no other operating system is going to adopt it.

That may well be, if so, that is exactly why it should not be used for Debian. I have no objection to other distros using it.

The vote isn't over yet

Posted Jan 9, 2014 4:26 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

If that is your objection, what are you recommending for Debian? None of the other leading contenders are going to be adopted for anything else either. They might make a port available but other operating systems aren't going to use it by default. They all have their own systems.

The vote isn't over yet

Posted Jan 3, 2014 23:31 UTC (Fri) by dag- (guest, #30207) [Link] (7 responses)

At this point I really would like to see Debian just pick something other than systemd. Just to see how it would play out and what predictions would hold true.

As the decision won't impact me, I don't have any strong opinions on what Debian should be doing. However I hope it comes to a conclusion soon.

PS Why wasn't a "portable systemd" project never considered, much like the "portable openssh" project ? The situation seems quite similar, upstream's use-case vs portability.

The vote isn't over yet

Posted Jan 4, 2014 2:04 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (5 responses)

> At this point I really would like to see Debian just pick something other than systemd. Just to see how it would play out and what predictions would hold true.
Yeah, it also would be interesting to do this with the nuclear war.

> PS Why wasn't a "portable systemd" project never considered, much like the "portable openssh" project ? The situation seems quite similar, upstream's use-case vs portability.
Systemd depends on a large number of Linux-specific functionality that simply doesn't exist on other systems.

The vote isn't over yet

Posted Jan 4, 2014 2:33 UTC (Sat) by dag- (guest, #30207) [Link]

> Yeah, it also would be interesting to do this with the nuclear war.

You're quite the pessimist :-)

The difference being that Debian wouldn't be destroyed by keeping the existing (or a better) init system, it may merely impact its pace and/or uptake. We don't know in what way, which makes it more interesting. Would a decision impact the userbase ? Would there be a large outcry ? A schism ? Would it increase ties with Ubuntu, alienate Debian derivatives ?

But I can say this because it won't impact me, unlike a nuclear war.

The vote isn't over yet

Posted Jan 4, 2014 12:55 UTC (Sat) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link] (3 responses)

> Systemd depends on a large number of Linux-specific functionality that simply doesn't exist on other systems.

well, actually... ;)

there is no reason at all why the "linux-specific functionality" (not That large after all) couldn't be implemented in the other systems (IIRC someone is implementing cgroupfs for the Hurd, how hard can it be to implement it over FreeBSD?)

The vote isn't over yet

Posted Jan 4, 2014 13:32 UTC (Sat) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (2 responses)

It's probably less of a technical problem than a social one; you would have to get it past the actual FreeBSD developers, who historically have been less than enthusiastic about taking on board stuff that originates from Linux.

The vote isn't over yet

Posted Jan 4, 2014 14:54 UTC (Sat) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link] (1 responses)

Considering its purpose would be "to run Debian GNU/kFreeBSD", the patch/module to kFreeBSD could be maintained by Debian if upstream refused it...

The vote isn't over yet

Posted Jan 4, 2014 15:21 UTC (Sat) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

That would also conveniently put the work where it belongs, namely onto the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD maintainers, who could then be scratching their own itch instead of forcing the rest of the project to scratch it for them by disconnecting Debian from where the rest of Linux seems to be going.

The vote isn't over yet

Posted Jan 6, 2014 7:10 UTC (Mon) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]

> PS Why wasn't a "portable systemd" project never considered, much like the "portable openssh" project ? The situation seems quite similar, upstream's use-case vs portability.

Because the Portable OpenSSH project ports OpenSSH from OpenBSD to more popular target platforms, and OpenSSH doesn't use much in the way of OpenBSD-specific functionality to begin with. (In fact, arguably Portable OpenSSH uses more Linux-specific functionality than OpenSSH uses OpenBSD-specific functionality; notably, Portable OpenSSH can use seccomp.)

systemd already runs on Linux, uses quite a lot more Linux-specific functionality in ways that are not easily removed (since they're used to implement critical bits of functionality), and the combination of interest and resources just doesn't seem likely to exist to port it to less popular UNIXes.

If someone wanted to port systemd, a separate "Portable systemd" project would be the way to do it, though that project should start by trying to add the necessary features from Linux to the target platform rather than trying to hack systemd to remove the use of those features.