Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

Posted Sep 2, 2014 2:41 UTC (Tue) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
In reply to: Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems by torquay
Parent article: Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

> The proposal put forward by the systemd folks is certainly interesting, but I can only see it useful for having 2 run-times: (1) the Ubuntu LTS run-time, (2) and the RHEL/CentOS/Scientific run-time. Essentially it becomes an abstraction layer for the (allegedly) two most practical run-times. Every other run-time is pointless, as it provides no value over a separate distro.

Shhh... don't tell everyone that most distros are redundant, they might get restless ... 8-)

If this scheme gets any traction I think the next question everyone will have is why they have so many different runtimes installed to get the apps they want and try to minimize and standardize, asking some hard questions about why exactly the distros are different and the API/ABIs are so broken.

The next question is one of branding, people brand themselves as a Debian, Ubuntu, Redhat, Gentoo, etc. person, like vi vs. emacs, but what point is this self-identification if the distros run co-equally on the same kernel and you can run a mix of them.

Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

Posted Sep 2, 2014 4:00 UTC (Tue) by mgb (guest, #3226) [Link]

But the distros are not equal. And that is good. Ubuntu, RHEL, Gentoo, Fedora, Slackware, etc all have different use cases.

Until the TC drank the systemd kool-aid we were very happy with Debian Stable for its breadth, stability, security, and seamless upgrades between releases.

But allowing RH to leverage systemd to churn a distro into oblivion is not a smart move.

Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

Posted Sep 2, 2014 4:50 UTC (Tue) by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051) [Link] (2 responses)

Really, Gentoo is not like those other you list. It's not a distribution. It is a meta-distribution; a set of recipes for building binaries. It's not fair to lump them together, to either type.

Gentoo's primary reason for existence is to avoid the pitfalls that apparently have been plaguing binary distros for a decade. The task of proper dependency management is what Gentoo is just fantastic at accomplishing.

Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

Posted Sep 2, 2014 8:28 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

:-)

I switched to gentoo, because when I was running the latest stable SuSE, I couldn't (for whatever reason) upgrade to the latest stable lilypond.

Now although I normally don't bother, I have full control if I need it ... (and I gather there are several linux developers who run gentoo, presumably for the same reason ...)

Cheers,
Wol

Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

Posted Sep 3, 2014 4:54 UTC (Wed) by speedster1 (guest, #8143) [Link]

> I gather there are several linux developers who run gentoo

I know Greg KH is a long-time gentoo dev who runs it on servers and build machines; just curious what other kernel devs have mentioned running gentoo?

Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

Posted Sep 5, 2014 19:40 UTC (Fri) by picca (subscriber, #90087) [Link] (1 responses)

And at the end GNOME maintainer will rely on only one runtime because it is time consumming... an step by step peoples will decide to work only with the gnome runtime because maintaing a bundle is a pain...

and eventually at the end only one runtime will remain.

Who will install a gnome runtime not maintain by gnome ?

so it will reduce diversity at the end.

Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

Posted Sep 21, 2014 14:39 UTC (Sun) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

The Gnome developers I know do use different distributions...