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

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 22, 2014 19:45 UTC (Sat) by dlang (guest, #313)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate by thedevil
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

also note the "this is a warning to you Gentoo" notice about how systemd is going to change udev so it no longer works on the current Gentoo

The systemd people claim that they are not forcing anyone to use it, but at the same time they state that their goal is to be the plumbing layer for all of Linux so that they can change all distros by just changing systemd.

These two worlds (where you can avoid using systemd by just picking a diffent distro and where they can change every distro by just changing systemd) are mutually exclusive.

So which statement should we believe?

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 22, 2014 20:04 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (3 responses)

You are presenting a classic false dichotomy. Both can be true at the same time. They can accomplish the goal of being a standard plumbing layer without the use of force by making it better than the alternatives so that major distributions voluntarily use it by default. One could say, they have already done just that.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 22, 2014 21:20 UTC (Sat) by mgb (guest, #3226) [Link] (2 responses)

> They can accomplish the goal of being a standard plumbing layer without the use of force by making it better than the alternatives so that major distributions voluntarily use it by default.

They tried that and failed. Approx 1% of Wheezy users replaced sysvinit with systemd, compared with e.g. approx 30% who replaced exim4 with postfix.

Most serious Debian users - users serious enough to replace the default mail system - do not want systemd.

So for Jessie we see plan B - you don't have to use systemd but they broke a whole bunch of stuff so it won't work without systemd.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 22, 2014 22:41 UTC (Sat) by gracinet (guest, #89400) [Link]

"They tried that and failed. Approx 1% of Wheezy users replaced sysvinit with systemd, compared with e.g. approx 30% who replaced exim4 with postfix."

I think that using these statistics light that might be very misleading. I don't know if I'm representative, but taking my case as an example :

- Systemd support in wheezy seemed just not ready for prime time to me [1]. The couple dozens of wheezy servers that I manage still run sysvinit. OTOH, I started running systemd (including as PID 1) on the few jessie systems I have immediately (laptop and home jukebox).

- Most of my wheezy systems are installed from an OpenVZ template that comes with postfix, whereas I was much more familiar with the default exim4. Turns out that on most of them I don't want anything more complicated than sending alerts to root, so I don't care. But I didn't switch to postfix myself.

[1] maybe I was wrong thinking that, that's not the point.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 23, 2014 18:53 UTC (Sun) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]

> So for Jessie we see plan B - you don't have to use systemd but they broke a whole bunch of stuff so it won't work without systemd.

This has been debunked approximately 1000 times -- even Ian's GR text explicitly notes that Jessie works just fine without systemd.

At some point it becomes hard to believe that this is a good-faith mistake on your part. Unfortunately, the only alternative I can see is that you're deliberately lying in an attempt to mislead people. If you're right, then surely you can convince people of that using actual facts?