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 6:01 UTC (Thu) by bferrell (subscriber, #624)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate by jonnor
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

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.

to post comments

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 (guest, #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...