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 21:20 UTC (Sat) by mgb (guest, #3226)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate by rahulsundaram
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

> 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.

to post comments

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?