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 19:09 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate by clemensg
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Systemd-as-a-project has stopped being just an init tool. It's now a plumbing layer replacement for Linux.

If you check the size of the init daemon itself, it's just about 50kloc with another 20kloc in libraries.

Splitting systemd-as-a-project into various components might make sense in the future once it stabilizes a bit. Inevitably there'll be questions of governance and maintenance strategy.

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The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 14, 2014 20:45 UTC (Fri) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (4 responses)

Systemd-as-a-project has stopped being just an init tool. It's now a plumbing layer replacement for Linux.

Which is the root of the claims about systemd trying to take everything over. A lot of that could be helped with some cosmetic changes of the kind Corbet is talking about. As an example, it would probably be better if the project were renamed the Linux Plumbing Layer project, with systemd just one prominent component of the project as a whole. Making it easier to get the individual components separately rather than getting the whole project and choosing what you want as configuration options would probably help, too. Those changes would fight the impression that systemd is taking over the world, and especially the wildly incorrect impression that all kinds of inappropriate stuff is winding up in PID 1.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 14, 2014 21:54 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (1 responses)

What I just heard you say was...
systemd could be more effective taking over the world if it just made some cosmetic changes to placate the people who are afraid of it taking over the world.

So systemd is currently taking over the world, in spite of itself. That's impressive. It's so useful and powerful a technology that even gross mismanagement of the project is unable to stop it from being widely adopted.

Snark aside, the downside to that cosmetic approach.. is that it claiming that level of configuration puts them on the hook for testing all the expanded configuration matrix. And requires larger API stability coverage than they are currently promising. Telling people what they want to hear, by deliberately crafting the message cosmetically...quickly puts them into a situation where they cannot deliver. I would look at cosmetic messaging like that as being far more manipulatively than what they are actually doing, designed to make people feel more comfortable than they should be.

And I think the systemd developers have been much more honest about what they are prepared to maintain and test and are telling people who want to deviate that they'll need to maintain and test that deviation. And moreover they are being very conservative about the API stability they promise. That honesty rankles, and feels like a punch in the mouth for people who want to hear the lipservice.

I still find it weird for example that systemd-shim chose to try to talk the unstable API that links logind to systemd instead of replacing logind itself and talking the stable logind API that apps depend on. That decisions still seems to me like asking for trouble and contrary to the guidance given concerning API stability. -shim is going to be a huge headache for Debian going forward as systemd evolves.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 14, 2014 21:57 UTC (Fri) by mgb (guest, #3226) [Link]

> I still find it weird for example that systemd-shim chose to try to talk the unstable API that links logind to systemd instead of replacing logind itself and talking the stable logind API that apps depend on. That decisions still seems to me like asking for trouble and contrary to the guidance given concerning API stability. -shim is going to be a huge headache for Debian going forward as systemd evolves.

Agreed. Systemd-shim cannot succeed inside systemd's anti-innovation framework. Consolekit2 outside systemd is the future.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 15, 2014 5:49 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

Well, yes. Renaming the project might help with the politics. I'm not so sure about splitting into multiple subprojects. Systemd is just not yet big enough for that (though it does approach the threshold where it might start making sense).

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 15, 2014 22:42 UTC (Sat) by misc (subscriber, #73730) [Link]

So we would explicitly acknowledge that we care than more than the purely technical merits ( not that this would be a bad thing, since we do not really care about technical merits only, but given the not so recent discussions around "meritocracy", it would be a interesting twist ).