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 8:56 UTC (Thu) by rvfh (guest, #31018)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate by neilbrown
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

> It isn't about whether it works, it is about what it is like to work with.

OK, but most user don't work with the init system, right? It's just a few developers that are affected, and far less people than are participating in discussions, right?

> So some important issues are complexity, transparency, familiarity, learning curves, etc.

OK, but as was said before, the learning curve for the old init or even upstart, when starting from scratch (not your case I suppose) is less steep with systemd... At least that's my personal experience after recently writing the service file for my [very simple] daemon for sysvinit, upstart and systemd.

I would go as far as to say that your voice would probably be one of the most useful, but maybe it gets buried in the noise...

Note: I used to maintain a Slackware-based distribution for a private company about 10 years ago.

to post comments

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 14, 2014 22:39 UTC (Fri) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]

> OK, but most user don't work with the init system, right? It's just a few developers that are affected, and far less people than are participating in discussions, right?

I wonder if that is true. I don't have any data - do you?

It isn't just developers that might need to work with an init system, it is also sysadmins, and many hobbyists serve as their own sysadmin.

You've probably heard the quote:
> Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.

With systemd, lots of simple things really are simple. It has very focussed domain-specific "knowledge" and does many of the things that you often want very easily. This makes the initial learning curve very gentle as you suggest.

But simple things aren't really all that interesting - of course those are easy. The complex things provide a much better test for what a system is like to work with. That is where the learning curve gets interesting.

With init.d scripts, most people will have been exposed to shell programming already so there is an opportunity for skills transfer. shell is undoubtedly a horrible language, but it is a powerful and flexible language and you can usually achieve what you need to. It is easy to add tracing (echo, set -x), easy to add special cases. Possible to address ad-hoc problems with ad-hoc solutions.

systemd is much better in terms of core functionality and over-all structure. But is it not a complete language. It seems to deliberately avoid being a programming language in the normal sense (witness the odd syntax for conditionals). So if you want to do "normal" things, it is very easy. But as you deviate from "normal" the learning curve gets very steep. When I do, I start to feel like I am fighting against it instead of working with it.

I've had two non-normal issues with systemd recently. They *should* be easy - but I didn't find them so. In one case I think I cobbled together a solution, but I don't really like it. Maybe the fact that the "obvious" approach didn't work is just a bug. For some reason, I just don't feel like trying to find out if it is.
In the other case systemd was behaving very strangely w.r.t. timeouts. I found a work-around but I still don't understand why it wasn't simple. Maybe I will if/when I try harder.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 21, 2014 17:56 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> > It isn't about whether it works, it is about what it is like to work with.

> OK, but most user don't work with the init system, right? It's just a few developers that are affected, and far less people than are participating in discussions, right?

Except you're making a major mistake that far too many IT workers make. You're assuming that systems have a sys-admin.

How many systems are like mine? I have a home network - two gentoo PCs, a Windows 7 laptop, a bunch of Android phones ... yep, I may be a sys-admin, but I'm a sys-admin merely because I'm a user and I'm the only person to admin my systems.

I want an init system that is simple to use, and SysVInit most certainly is NOT. Currently (while I may not be able to blame it on the init system, I can certainly blame it on the lack of time to trouble-shoot) I have a system with broken raid and nfs. I don't want to add init weirdos to the rest of my boot-time cussing ...

Cheers,
Wol