Debian votes on init systems

Posted Dec 7, 2019 4:13 UTC (Sat) by mgb (guest, #3226)
In reply to: Debian votes on init systems by mjg59
Parent article: Debian votes on init systems

> Where does this 98%+ figure come from?

It's fairly well known among application developers. About a month back LWN posted a link to an article where you could have seen a bunch of similar numbers.:
https://valdyas.org/fading/hacking/krita-hacking/back-fro...

The key takeaway is "The Free Desktop has three percent of the installed base of Windows/macOS". Not all of that 3% is systemd. No serious application developer throws away 98%+ of their potential user base by depending on systemd.

Debian votes on init systems

Posted Dec 7, 2019 4:33 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (5 responses)

Newsflash: SysV init also doesn't run on 98% of computers.

Why would developers depend on it then?

Debian votes on init systems

Posted Dec 7, 2019 4:49 UTC (Sat) by mgb (guest, #3226) [Link] (4 responses)

Most users only care about applications, not distros.

Application developers either depend on no init system or else they attempt to target some kind of lowest common denominator.

Systemd provides no application functionality. It's a distro wars thing - RedHat's EEE move against competing distros.

Debian votes on init systems

Posted Dec 7, 2019 5:01 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> Most users only care about applications, not distros.
I guess that's it for Unix, then. Goodbye. We hardly knew you.

> Systemd provides no application functionality.
It actually does.

Debian votes on init systems

Posted Dec 7, 2019 14:01 UTC (Sat) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link]

There's plenty of applications supporting systemd socket activation, for example.

Debian votes on init systems

Posted Dec 7, 2019 18:31 UTC (Sat) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link]

Systemd with its fd store allows for an application to update itself without loosing single connection with few lines of simple code. In theory the application can code it itself, but it is highly non-trivial to make it work reliably and is rarely done.

Debian votes on init systems

Posted Dec 7, 2019 18:44 UTC (Sat) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

Application developers either depend on no init system or else they attempt to target some kind of lowest common denominator.

Or they can take advantage of systemd features either when they detect that they're running on a systemd-based system, or if the user tells them they're running on systemd (e.g., via a command-line option).

It's a distro wars thing - RedHat's EEE move against competing distros.

How can it be a “distro wars thing” if most distributions now come with systemd as a default, and systemd itself is developed by a diverse community including contributors from various distribution projects? Also various systemd features are patterned on approaches from distributions other than Red Hat's, such as Debian GNU/Linux.

One major advantage of systemd is that it standardises much of the “basic plumbing” of a Linux system. This makes your life easier if you're building a distribution because you don't have to come up with that stuff yourself, and can spend the time you save on other aspects of your work. If you're an application developer, systemd itself isn't as immediately useful but you can still profit from the more homogeneous and predictable system environment on systemd-based distributions that share more of the “basic plumbing” than we were used to in pre-systemd times. This makes it easier for you to offer applications that support a wider variety of Linux distributions with fewer special cases that you need to take into account.

Debian votes on init systems

Posted Dec 7, 2019 4:45 UTC (Sat) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (12 responses)

That argument is equivalent to saying no serious developer would throw away 98% of their potential user base by depending on glibc, and yet.

Debian votes on init systems

Posted Dec 7, 2019 4:52 UTC (Sat) by mgb (guest, #3226) [Link] (9 responses)

> That argument is equivalent to saying no serious developer would throw away 98% of their potential user base by depending on glibc, and yet.

And yet we code to various widely supported C and C++ standards, not glibc.

Debian votes on init systems

Posted Dec 7, 2019 5:36 UTC (Sat) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (8 responses)

Try rebuilding everything against musl and see how many failures you get.

Debian votes on init systems

Posted Dec 7, 2019 6:24 UTC (Sat) by mgb (guest, #3226) [Link] (6 responses)

> Try rebuilding everything against musl and see how many failures you get.

We use various compilers and library implementations and operating systems to make sure our code is portable.

Nobody codes to systemd - it's a moving target that nobody but RedHat can ever hope to keep up with and to do so would be to throw away 98%+ of our potential user base.

Debian votes on init systems

Posted Dec 7, 2019 6:54 UTC (Sat) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (5 responses)

Plenty of code uses glibc functionality that isn't present in other C libraries. It's clear that many people writing applications for Linux don't care about non-Linux operating systems, which (by your metric) means they're throwing away 98%+ of their potential user base.

Debian votes on init systems

Posted Dec 7, 2019 7:25 UTC (Sat) by mgb (guest, #3226) [Link] (4 responses)

What is this Linux-only non-portable non-system-software APPLICATION that your Mom, Brother, or Cat would hate to do without?

Debian votes on init systems

Posted Dec 7, 2019 7:41 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Amazon? Google? Facebook?

Debian votes on init systems

Posted Dec 7, 2019 7:45 UTC (Sat) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

All serious application authors are writing multi-platform applications that your Mom, Brother or Cat would hate to do without?

Debian votes on init systems

Posted Dec 9, 2019 19:49 UTC (Mon) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link] (1 responses)

Nice shift of goalposts there!

In any case, there's loads of very specific software that's critical. For any (most?) big companies (especially the ones that have been around for a while) it's often the same: Loads of systems, loads of interdependencies, etc. Enough stuff that is entirely Windows specific, plus various Linux specific, plus various systemd-specific, etc. You could go on forever basically. It's messy, everyone knows it should be better, but hey, big company..

Debian votes on init systems

Posted Dec 9, 2019 19:53 UTC (Mon) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

In all the time I've been aware of their comments on the subject, mgb has never displayed the slightest interest in a fair and reasonable conversation about systemd.

Debian votes on init systems

Posted Dec 7, 2019 9:00 UTC (Sat) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

In case anyone wants to work on the Debian port to musl:

https://wiki.debian.org/HelmutGrohne/rebootstrap

Debian votes on init systems

Posted Dec 18, 2019 0:07 UTC (Wed) by xnox (guest, #63320) [Link] (1 responses)

I'd even say glibc is a rapidly growing target, with all Windows 10 machines natively able to host and run glibc elf binaries thanks to Windows Subsystem for Linux.

Heck, one can even see systemd running there too soon.

Somehow I sense the argument will not fall, even if 98% of computers out there can and do run systemd.

Debian votes on init systems

Posted Dec 18, 2019 2:21 UTC (Wed) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

Considering that WSL2 already runs a Linux kernel in a VM, it should be easy to run systemd on Windows.

Debian votes on init systems

Posted Dec 7, 2019 21:22 UTC (Sat) by jkingweb (subscriber, #113039) [Link]

This is one of the most outlandish arguments I've read in a while. There's tons of software that depends on something not-systemd (e.g. features of POSIX, or Linux, or X11) which, in turn, does not interoperate with Windows or macOS (or Android, or iOS, or whatever else). Even if we take as a given that this means automatically failing to reach "97%" of users (or is it computers?), this is clearly something which is often perfectly acceptable to the authors of applications. Why should systemd be any different?

Frankly, if we're talking about whether or not to have a hard dependence on systemd, we're probably already talking about software specifically for Linux, making this whole 98% business a giant red herring.

Debian votes on init systems

Posted Dec 8, 2019 22:19 UTC (Sun) by jwarnica (subscriber, #27492) [Link] (1 responses)

So, to be clear, your argument is that because Windows doesn't support systemd, then Debian shouldn't, either?

Debian votes on init systems

Posted Dec 8, 2019 22:56 UTC (Sun) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link]

Of course, Windows' Service Controller is vastly more sophisticated than classic SysV init, including as it does the ability to handle start-once, restart on failure, etc etc, and provides a standard, non-scripted way of launching and managing services.

So if you wanted a common approach, advanced Unix/Linux service managers such as launchd, SMF, and systemd are much closer to Windows than BSD or SysV init.