The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate [LWN.net]

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 13, 2014 3:32 UTC (Thu) by jonnor (guest, #76768)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate by bferrell
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

init does not have "one simple configuration file". inittab is basically only used for runlevels and ttys, the rest of config and logic is spread around in /etc/rc.d, /etc/init.d/, /etc/default, /etc/sysconfig - depending on which distro you are on.

Almost universally the people working on init and related plumbing have chosen systemd. A core tenent (for good and bad) of open source is that those that do the work, get to make the calls.

You have a wealth of choices. Sticking only to the constructive ones that does not involve using systemd, you can: use and support distros which does not mandate systemd (like Gentoo, Slackware), you can volunteer to maintain sysvinit support in your favorite distro (for instance in Debian), or support those that do this type of work already, or you can create your own GNU/Linux distribution (or support those that do), or can use another free operating system like *BSD.
Or you can complain that you don't like any of these choices, and put the responsibility onto someone else for the situation.

It is not a human right to tell others, who are doing work that you can benefit from without cost, what to work on or or how to do things.

to post comments

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 13, 2014 6:01 UTC (Thu) by bferrell (subscriber, #624) [Link] (11 responses)

Sir, you have just demonstrated your complete ignorance of exactly HOW init works.

init, the binary, has exactly ONE configuration file. The other files and directories are consulted by other programs that init may or may not call.

Yes, inittab defines what occurs at different run levels. Those run levels, conventionally, have certain sets of processes. and sometimes it directly maintains them... Not often in modern systems.

What init DOES do is to call a very flexible process management system that works correctly and doesn't have "odd corner cases" that will be fixed somewhere in the future.

In this case, people have in fact offered to perform the necessary maintenance. I personally have done so and been met with thundering silence.

No one has claimed a "human right". That bit of hyperbole is yours. Those of us who have been using, testing and supporting Linux for decades are not the leaches you attempt to paint us.

There are individuals who have a new vision. There is nothing wrong with vision, and has been pointed out, sometimes a new vision fails or is not well thought out.

The correct response to "how do I do ..." is NOT "why do you want to do that?". It is "You can do that this way, but you may want to think about this" or to simply ignore the question.

The first response is in effect saying "I am better than you and I know more than you so just shut up and do what I tell you". This is the crux of this entire debate because the response to questioning of the new vision is it's equal and that rankles!

Without the legions of people who use, test and advocate for OS freedom, you people of vision would have nothing to have a vision of.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 13, 2014 8:42 UTC (Thu) by rvfh (guest, #31018) [Link] (1 responses)

> init, the binary, has exactly ONE configuration file. The other files and directories are consulted by other programs that init may or may not call.

You do know this is incorrect right? You do understand that what you are saying does not make sense, and that although the old init *program* uses only inittab, the init *ecosystem* needs all those scripts to be really useful?

Or are you just trolling?

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 13, 2014 9:01 UTC (Thu) by peter-b (subscriber, #66996) [Link]

> Or are you just trolling?

I went back and re-read his post, and this sentence stuck out:

>> What init DOES do is to call a very flexible process management system that works correctly and doesn't have "odd corner cases" that will be fixed somewhere in the future.

I think he's just trolling.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 13, 2014 15:39 UTC (Thu) by jonnor (guest, #76768) [Link]

I know that to be even remotely useful, sysvinit needs much more than just the init binary. Typically it needs some thousand lines of shell code, all executed as root.

Thank you for ignoring the point that you do have a number of constructive options available.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 13, 2014 16:11 UTC (Thu) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

>> What init DOES do is to call a very flexible process management system

Granted.

>> that works correctly and doesn't have "odd corner cases"

ROTFLBTC.

sys5rc definitely does NOT work correctly in quite a few cases which some people (not only systemd proponents) deem to be rather important.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 13, 2014 17:12 UTC (Thu) by mmeehan (subscriber, #72524) [Link]

> The correct response to "how do I do ..." is NOT "why do you want to do that?". It is "You can do that this way, but you may want to think about this" or to simply ignore the question.

Actually, "How do I do X" isn't always a useful question. This is called the XY Problem [1] and comes up very frequently in Q&A style support forums [2], to the point where it's a Q&A antipattern [3]. This is why you hear:

> "why do you want to do that?"

It's not because

> The first response is in effect saying "I am better than you and I know more than you so just shut up and do what I tell you".

...that's your projection. It's really about "X doesn't have a direct analogue, and frankly it doesn't make sense in the way you phrased the question. Maybe you want feature Y, but it has somewhat different semantics. I need to know more what you're *really* trying to do, in a broad sense (because it turns out you need Z instead)."

If you intend to ask questions, you must be prepared to answer questions asked of you. Questioning your use-case is not a personal challenge!

[1] http://mywiki.wooledge.org/XyProblem
[2] http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the...
[3] http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#goal

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 13, 2014 18:53 UTC (Thu) by Seegras (guest, #20463) [Link] (5 responses)

> What init DOES do is to call a very flexible process management system
> that works correctly and doesn't have "odd corner cases" that will be
> fixed somewhere in the future.

Bah. I didn't like SysV init when we changed to it (yes, I am one of those people whose first Linux distros had BSD init), and while it definitely is rather more flexible than BSD init, "works correctly" isn't what I would use to describe it. Rather: "A mess of shell scripts that work most of the time".

So systemd is a (another; I think I tried about all of them) replacement for SysV init, hopefully a better one. We'll see.

Init-systems are not a cause for flamewars anyway (unless you run emacs as init; then you need to be flamed).

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 13, 2014 19:36 UTC (Thu) by bferrell (subscriber, #624) [Link]

I remember before ANY init scripts... when init ran everything

And yes, if you run emacs as init, flamed is probably not needed... But you MIGHT get a darwin award

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 17, 2014 23:41 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (3 responses)

I ran Emacs as init for a while, but its service supervision really isn't very good.

One shouldn't write init systems in Lisp anyway. They have not enough pros and far too many cons.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 19, 2014 22:04 UTC (Wed) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link] (2 responses)

> One shouldn't write init systems in Lisp anyway. They have not enough pros and far too many cons.

In case anyone didn't get the joke: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/cons

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 19, 2014 22:29 UTC (Wed) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link] (1 responses)

> In case anyone didn't get the joke ...

thanks for pointing that out!! I would have missed it otherwise and that would have been a shame.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 25, 2014 22:11 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

I dunno. Your software saves my data repeatedly, I make you chuckle once.

It doesn't really seem like sufficient recompense...

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 20, 2014 17:41 UTC (Thu) by toyotabedzrock (guest, #88005) [Link] (8 responses)

You are claiming that he can choose when he clearly cannot.
And this is a community. Not a business, you cannot dismiss users or people who contribute to other parts of the Linux ecosystem.

Without them you might as well contribute to dev/null

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 20, 2014 22:13 UTC (Thu) by wagner17 (guest, #5580) [Link] (7 responses)

Why are you saying there is no choice? The article pointed out several choices.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 22, 2014 17:51 UTC (Sat) by thedevil (guest, #32913) [Link] (6 responses)

"The article pointed out several choices."

Quote?

Ok, this isn't fair, because I know you can't - you probably
remember some other article or one of the other comments. So
I'll help you. You want to say "slackware or gentoo". I have
been using Debian for about 15 years now, sometimes contributing
patches and packages under the sponsor system. Switching to
another distro now, with my energy drained by age and time
depleted by $DAYJOB, is just about impossible. So, in fact, no
choice.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 22, 2014 19:45 UTC (Sat) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (5 responses)

also note the "this is a warning to you Gentoo" notice about how systemd is going to change udev so it no longer works on the current Gentoo

The systemd people claim that they are not forcing anyone to use it, but at the same time they state that their goal is to be the plumbing layer for all of Linux so that they can change all distros by just changing systemd.

These two worlds (where you can avoid using systemd by just picking a diffent distro and where they can change every distro by just changing systemd) are mutually exclusive.

So which statement should we believe?

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 22, 2014 19:59 UTC (Sat) by filipjoelsson (guest, #2622) [Link]

You do know that udev already has been forked by Gentoo, right?

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 22, 2014 20:04 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (3 responses)

You are presenting a classic false dichotomy. Both can be true at the same time. They can accomplish the goal of being a standard plumbing layer without the use of force by making it better than the alternatives so that major distributions voluntarily use it by default. One could say, they have already done just that.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 22, 2014 21:20 UTC (Sat) by mgb (guest, #3226) [Link] (2 responses)

> They can accomplish the goal of being a standard plumbing layer without the use of force by making it better than the alternatives so that major distributions voluntarily use it by default.

They tried that and failed. Approx 1% of Wheezy users replaced sysvinit with systemd, compared with e.g. approx 30% who replaced exim4 with postfix.

Most serious Debian users - users serious enough to replace the default mail system - do not want systemd.

So for Jessie we see plan B - you don't have to use systemd but they broke a whole bunch of stuff so it won't work without systemd.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 22, 2014 22:41 UTC (Sat) by gracinet (guest, #89400) [Link]

"They tried that and failed. Approx 1% of Wheezy users replaced sysvinit with systemd, compared with e.g. approx 30% who replaced exim4 with postfix."

I think that using these statistics light that might be very misleading. I don't know if I'm representative, but taking my case as an example :

- Systemd support in wheezy seemed just not ready for prime time to me [1]. The couple dozens of wheezy servers that I manage still run sysvinit. OTOH, I started running systemd (including as PID 1) on the few jessie systems I have immediately (laptop and home jukebox).

- Most of my wheezy systems are installed from an OpenVZ template that comes with postfix, whereas I was much more familiar with the default exim4. Turns out that on most of them I don't want anything more complicated than sending alerts to root, so I don't care. But I didn't switch to postfix myself.

[1] maybe I was wrong thinking that, that's not the point.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 23, 2014 18:53 UTC (Sun) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]

> So for Jessie we see plan B - you don't have to use systemd but they broke a whole bunch of stuff so it won't work without systemd.

This has been debunked approximately 1000 times -- even Ian's GR text explicitly notes that Jessie works just fine without systemd.

At some point it becomes hard to believe that this is a good-faith mistake on your part. Unfortunately, the only alternative I can see is that you're deliberately lying in an attempt to mislead people. If you're right, then surely you can convince people of that using actual facts?