Uselessd [LWN.net]

Uselessd

Posted Nov 17, 2014 1:02 UTC (Mon) by ras (subscriber, #33059)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate by k8to
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

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 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”.