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

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 14, 2014 12:26 UTC (Fri) by k8to (guest, #15413)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

I think almost all the commentary is kind of missing the boat, including this article. I'm pretty much in full agreement with this article, and think people who care at all about the topic,or the metatopic, should read http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/

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The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 14, 2014 12:29 UTC (Fri) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (4 responses)

Err, I meant the above article misses the boat a bit, and the linked article is on the money.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 14, 2014 15:40 UTC (Fri) by rsidd (guest, #2582) [Link] (3 responses)

The question is, will the anti-systemd folks actually do something about it? There seems to be consensus that (a) sysvinit has outlived its usefulness (b) there is no replacement that looks more attractive than systemd (even the original upstart author, Scott James Remnant, seems to think systemd is better today). I have not used a systemd-based system and have no technical objections to it. My objection is to the authors' philosophy that only Linux matters (I have used FreeBSD and Dragonfly BSD in the past), and to the tendency to make systemd a hard dependency of userland software (especially in Gnome) as opposed to merely a better way to handle dependencies when booting a system.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 14, 2014 16:13 UTC (Fri) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link]

That's rather interesting perspective since there is nothing that says that open or closed software has to be share-able between OS and there is nothing wrong with writing software specifically with spesific OS in mind be it Windows, BSD, Linux, OS-X or Solaris to take directly benefits of what relevant OS has to offer.

systemd is an init system specifically written with linux in mind and thus tightly integrates and takes all of what the linux and it's kernel has to offer just like Windows has it's own (winload.exe ), BSD has it's own ( BSD-style init), Now Linux will ( in most distro's ) have it's own ( systemd ), OS-X has Launchd and Solaris has SMF.

As far as I know people aren't switching out the init system that is being shipped except on linux and on top of that last time I checked the BSD and Solaris developers were perfectly capable of updating/replacing their own init system if they deemed it necessary as well as carrying downstream patches to upstreams that dont want to support them.

Why the linux ecosystem has to have gazillion init system makes no sense and on top of that supporting more then one is arguably somewhat crazy and maintainers nightmare from my point of view.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 14, 2014 20:15 UTC (Fri) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]

(b) there is no replacement that looks more attractive than systemd

I would amend that to say that there is no replacement that looks more technically capable than systemd. People who are interested primarily in its technical capabilities see that as making it the most attractive choice. People who are concerned about design beyond pure technical capability don't necessarily reach the same conclusion. You are obviously skeptical of some of those other factors, too.

I agree that the big question is whether the people who don't like systemd are going to create a practical alternative. It certainly should be possible to create a better competitor for systemd than the current options while still avoiding some of the design choices that people dislike in systemd. That said, I doubt that it's possible to achieve some of the stuff that systemd does (e.g. recording things from early boot) without making the corresponding design decisions (e.g. running logging through PID 1).

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 14, 2014 22:35 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

If people who want systemd features on BSD want to go down this path the option is always available to port systemd to a new OS with its own repo. Different OSs make different decisions though, BSD already had a totally different init system than most Linux systems, and has a different kernel with different features. If you are a userspace software developer, the kernel and low level plumbing outside of POSIX (packet filtering, or *notify or kqueue or cgroups, jails or namespaces) on different systems is going to always be different, if you use a platform-specific feature then you have to think about portability, either re-implementing chunks of code for different kernels or accepting that you can only run on a particular platform.

GNOME still runs on BSD, just without the session management that it would get on Linux, if people start using other systemd features (like the watchdog or relying on it for daemonization) then they will need to have fallbacks if they want to be portable or *BSDs will have to add the appropriate tools.

Uselessd

Posted Nov 17, 2014 1:02 UTC (Mon) by ras (subscriber, #33059) [Link] (2 responses)

The person behind uselessd writes more insight into systemd than most, and he puts that on display in the uselessd home page. It's an excellent read if you have the time.

We know he is thoroughly familiar with systemd - because he has effectively ported it to freebsd. That also tells us what he things of systemd as an init system: he likes it a lot. Yet he is a member of (maybe the leader of?) boycottsystemd. So for him this isn't a technical argument about systemd vs any other init system. He is boycotting systemd for some other reason. (Note how this contrasts to udev vs devfs: the divide rested on very real technical differences between the two.)

I'm guessing posts from Lennart like this one may have something to do with it:

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2014-...

Quoting from that link:

> Also note that at that point we intend to move udev onto kdbus as
> transport, and get rid of the userspace-to-userspace netlink-based
> tranport udev used so far. Unless the systemd-haters prepare another
> kdbus userspace until then this will effectively also mean that we will
> not support non-systemd systems with udev anymore starting at that
> point. Gentoo folks, this is your wakeup call.

Uselessd shines a light on that wakeup call, showing it for what it is. Its a threat by the person currently doing all the work, effectively saying "it's my way or the highway". It's only effective because he *is* doing all the work. If uselessd is a viable long term option the threat looses it's punch. Sadly uselessd's home page doesn't radiate a long term feel.

Uselessd

Posted Nov 17, 2014 3:29 UTC (Mon) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

I don't think there is a "threat" here, implicit or otherwise, and Lennart doesn't do all the work, there are plenty of other developers and if his leadership is a problem for other developers and downstream users then they can fork it, like Xorg/Xfree86, and move on.

Uselessd

Posted Nov 17, 2014 9:33 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

Its a threat by the person currently doing all the work, effectively saying "it's my way or the highway".

Not really. You can use libsystemd (which contains the userspace part of kdbus) without using the rest of systemd, and if you don't want to do even that then writing your own userspace kdbus binding isn't exactly rocket science.

In effect the “threat” is that Lennart and his colleagues will eventually change one of udev's internal implementation details. The kernel developers do this all the time – with much less warning ahead of time – and nobody considers that a “threat”.