Debian reconsiders init-system diversity [LWN.net]

Debian reconsiders init-system diversity

Posted Nov 12, 2019 13:26 UTC (Tue) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link] (18 responses)

Systemd is free software. People are free to improve it, and if a stubborn maintainer refuses to accept the changes, they are free to fork it and make it better in their own way. Lack of serious attempts in this direction is a sign to me that nobody really cares about supposed systemd's flaws to actually do something about them. Until there comes another Poettering who creates something clearly better, things will remain as they are. For now, systemd is this clearly better thing.

Systemd was adopted so widely so quickly mostly because, for everyone except a group of die-hards, it was a huge relief from the pain of existing init infrastructure. Lack of alternatives may be simply a result of the fact that systemd did things so well that there is not much of a reason to do anything differently.

Also, I am a long-time Debian user and I wish for Debian to not become a proving grounds for someone's pet peeve that prevents the whole system from progressing. If there is a way to provide init system diversity without placing an unwanted burden on people doing unrelated work - then fine, do it. But if it's not possible, then I'm perfectly fine with systemd's monopoly.

Debian reconsiders init-system diversity

Posted Nov 12, 2019 18:14 UTC (Tue) by bkw1a (guest, #4101) [Link] (17 responses)

> Systemd was adopted so widely so quickly mostly because, for everyone except a group of die-hards, it was a huge relief from the pain of existing init infrastructure.

My understanding was that systemd was adopted widely because Gnome added it as a dependency.

Debian reconsiders init-system diversity

Posted Nov 12, 2019 22:45 UTC (Tue) by tchernobog (guest, #73595) [Link]

Systemd is in most server installations, and now increasingly used if containerization is in the picture.

No GNOME there.

Rather, a very appealing feature set for service unit handling that improves security, logging and enforcing usage limits.

As a system architect of large installations (we are talking several thousands of container instances), I couldn't do without systemd anymore.

Debian reconsiders init-system diversity

Posted Nov 12, 2019 22:58 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

> My understanding was that systemd was adopted widely because Gnome added it as a dependency.

GNOME added as a dependency to some interfaces. Those interfaces have alternative implementations. This isn't the reason why major distributions have adopted systemd

Debian reconsiders init-system diversity

Posted Nov 13, 2019 13:13 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

My understanding was that systemd was adopted widely because Gnome added it as a dependency.

I think the more probable explanation is that distribution engineers realised that a standardised plumbing layer à la systemd was likely to save them a whole lot of work down the road.

Debian reconsiders init-system diversity

Posted Nov 14, 2019 21:46 UTC (Thu) by ms_43 (subscriber, #99293) [Link] (13 responses)

Apparently Gnome 3 runs just fine on FreeBSD with no systemd in sight as recently as 2016, which is about 3 years after systemd was widely adopted. Maybe that news page is out of date and it even works today.

https://www.freebsd.org/gnome/newsflash.html

Debian reconsiders init-system diversity

Posted Nov 14, 2019 22:14 UTC (Thu) by mgb (guest, #3226) [Link] (12 responses)

Applications want to be portable.

No serious application depends on systemd because you'd be locking out 98-99% of your potential user base.

I've heard that Gnome multi-seat might depend on systemd but I don't know anyone who uses it.

Debian reconsiders init-system diversity

Posted Nov 14, 2019 22:18 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (6 responses)

My preconceived notion of GNOME's userbase is "GNOME developers, plus people who accept the default configuration of whatever desktop Linux distribution they installed".

Debian reconsiders init-system diversity

Posted Nov 15, 2019 19:43 UTC (Fri) by tpo (subscriber, #25713) [Link] (4 responses)

> My preconceived notion of GNOME's userbase is "GNOME developers, plus people who accept the default configuration of whatever desktop Linux distribution they installed".

Some data:

http://tpo.sourcepole.ch/articles/194%20popularity-of-des...

Debian reconsiders init-system diversity

Posted Nov 16, 2019 1:05 UTC (Sat) by karkhaz (subscriber, #99844) [Link] (2 responses)

Here is some different data: interesting because Arch Linux has no default desktop environment nor window manager. Most popular, in order, are plasma, gnome, xfde, openbox, and i3.

https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/fun

Debian reconsiders init-system diversity

Posted Nov 16, 2019 5:15 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (1 responses)

> https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/fun

It seems a little odd that file managers don't correspond to the desktop environment in these stats. What's the explanation for that?

Debian reconsiders init-system diversity

Posted Nov 16, 2019 17:45 UTC (Sat) by karkhaz (subscriber, #99844) [Link]

My guess: folks who use window managers rather than desktop environments may decide to also install a file manager to use with their WM. So for example nautilus file manager has as much share as gnome desktop environment plus a little more, due to the i3, xmonad, sway etc users who also installed it.

Debian reconsiders init-system diversity

Posted Nov 18, 2019 22:56 UTC (Mon) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link]

I prefer these graphs from the Debian Popularity Contest:

Debian - SysV vs. systemd popularity as total number installed

Debian - SysV vs. systemd popularity as a Percentage of Installs

SysV use in Debian at this point is a rounding error.

Debian reconsiders init-system diversity

Posted Nov 22, 2019 10:59 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> "GNOME developers, plus people who accept the default configuration of whatever desktop Linux distribution they installed".

Which is why my make.conf has "-gtk -gnome" in it ... (gentoo make options, for those who don't know). In other words, "disable them if you can".

Cheers,
Wol

Debian reconsiders init-system diversity

Posted Nov 14, 2019 22:28 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> Applications want to be portable.
> No serious application depends on systemd because you'd be locking out 98-99% of your potential user base.

Hard dependency, no -- but any serious application will already have a non-trivial amount of platform-specific code, even when using portability-enhancing frameworks like Qt.

Debian reconsiders init-system diversity

Posted Nov 15, 2019 11:10 UTC (Fri) by tao (subscriber, #17563) [Link] (3 responses)

That's why all MacOS software doesn't use any MacOS-specific features, to be able to run on Windows, right? Because that would lock out too big of a potential user base.

... Oh, wait...

Oh, but all iPhone software is written to be compatible with Android, right? Depending on iOS-specific features would lock out too big of a potential user base.

Oh, and there's no server software written specifically for Windows Server, because the largest market is Linux...

Besides, most Linux distros use systemd. Your realistic potential user base uses Linux. This isn't an issue. GDM (one of the components in GNOME that benefits from systemd) isn't ever gonna be used on MacOS or Windows.

Debian reconsiders init-system diversity

Posted Nov 15, 2019 14:55 UTC (Fri) by mgb (guest, #3226) [Link] (2 responses)

You are looking at Linux distros from the point of view of packagers but Linux distros are 99% the work product of the authors of FLOSS applications. Application authors have no interest in losing 98-99% of our user base by tying ourselves to systemd-EEE. In reality no serious applications, as written, rely on systemd-EEE. We strongly prefer more-or-less portable interfaces such as OpenGL, Qt, POSIX, and SQL.

As a software engineer I also oppose the EEE aspects of systemd-EEE and the resulting Linux monoculture as counter-productive to software evolution for similar reasons that I for decades have opposed Windows EEE.

The push for systemd-EEE is driven by packagers working for a corporation which monetizes the work of FLOSS authors for its own benefit.

The unnecessary tying of FLOSS applications to systemd-EEE is a harmful varnish applied to FLOSS applications by packagers.

Debian reconsiders init-system diversity

Posted Nov 15, 2019 16:49 UTC (Fri) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (1 responses)

Owch.

(a) what is EEE?

(b) The push for systemd is driven by people like me who want it because if makes our job (regardless of whether we get paid for it) a whole damn lot easier, not to mention people like Lennart who realized that the then-current state of fractured broken tools (including upstart) is unsustainable and decided to effing do something about it. I can only assume that the same holds for RedHat. Kindly explain what could possibly be bad about that.

(c) If you don't want other people to profit from your work (NB, you profit from theirs too) then don't publish your code under a free license. Or at all. This is 100% orthogonal to systemd-or-not.

(d) almost no program depends on systemd-as-init. Gnome for one does because it saved them from reimplementing a whole load of compatibility crap and/or from depending on broken unmaintained libraries like consolekit. You don't like that? fine, then kindly help elogind become a fully-supported alternate implementation – instead of lamenting that nobody does free work to cater to your sensibilities.

Debian reconsiders init-system diversity

Posted Nov 15, 2019 19:39 UTC (Fri) by geert (subscriber, #98403) [Link]

> (a) what is EEE?

"Embrace, Extend, Extinguish", is what Google Search told me.

Debian reconsiders init-system diversity

Posted Nov 12, 2019 16:01 UTC (Tue) by ale2018 (guest, #128727) [Link] (4 responses)

> Any effort to keep and use other init system fall into a niche user case.

In fact, Linux is a niche user case itself. If we reason by that logic, we can install Windows and stop worrying.

Servers are niche cases too. In many cases, servers need no GUI. If needed, LXDE is more than enough. Most often, games, fancy word processors, GUI network managers and such are not needed too.

I'd rather switch to Devuan than systemd.

Debian reconsiders init-system diversity

Posted Nov 12, 2019 16:23 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (3 responses)

Once you are in a niche use case (such as Linux desktops), the critical bit becomes finding people who will actually do the work to keep that niche viable.

In that regard, it's a shame that Devuan (a) appears to be in the process of imploding, and (b) wasn't able to function within the Debian project itself, keeping non-systemd users happy and providing Debian with the people needed to keep alternatives to systemd alive in the Debian world.

Debian reconsiders init-system diversity

Posted Nov 12, 2019 16:49 UTC (Tue) by ale2018 (guest, #128727) [Link] (2 responses)

> (b) wasn't able to function within the Debian project itself,

AFAIK it was. There is a debian-init-diversity mailing list where Debian developers like Dmitry Bogatov and Devuan developers like KatolaZ cooperate to maintain SysV code.

Debian reconsiders init-system diversity

Posted Nov 12, 2019 16:58 UTC (Tue) by seyman (subscriber, #1172) [Link]

> There is a debian-init-diversity mailing list

I believe the list you're thinking of is this one: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/debian...

Debian reconsiders init-system diversity

Posted Nov 12, 2019 17:01 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

The very existence of Devuan as a separate project, rather than the people involved in Devuan working to ensure that you can continue to replace systemd with a.n.other init system in a standard Debian install (complete with appropriate tweaks to d-i so that you can choose to never run systemd on your Debian install) was a sign that Devuan as a whole was not able to function inside Debian - they needed a separate project to do what they wanted to do.

I'm not surprised that some Devuan developers were able to function inside Debian, and I'm glad that they could, but I can't help but think that we wouldn't be here today if the Devuan project had just been like-minded Debian Developers working inside Debian to keep non-systemd init systems usable.

Debian reconsiders init-system diversity

Posted Nov 13, 2019 14:53 UTC (Wed) by Deleted user 129183 (guest, #129183) [Link]

> I miss an alternative to reimplement systemd from scratch letting to people fix that what are being criticizim these years

I think that nosh <https://jdebp.eu/Softwares/nosh/> could be a good start. It was written with being compatible with systemd units in mind, and is of a much cleaner design.