On 31/01/19 at 03:38, Joel Roth via Dng wrote: > On Thu, Jan 31, 2019 at 12:19:44AM +0100, Alessandro Selli wrote: >> Might interest someone: >> >> https://lwn.net/Articles/777595/ >> >> [Front] Posted Jan 28, 2019 20:05 UTC (Mon) by corbet >> >> His attempt to cast that story for the >> pleasure of his audience resulted in a sympathetic and nuanced look at a >> turbulent chapter in the history of the Linux system. > Hard to believe I listened to the same talk Corbet > is describing. What I heard was a propaganda piece, > finding reasons to sell the systemd approach > to BSD conference attendees.
Not really. He points out there were good reasons to want a new init, that systemd was a try at innovating something that was old, and that this is a different matter compared to *how* that change was implemented. Honestly, the anti-systemd front is never going to prevail pushing technology dating from the 70's or steering the debate into an ad hominem assault against Lennart Poettering. It's only chance is developing something better, an init system and daemon management-and-monitoring tool that was simpler, more versatile, customizable and stable than systemd. That is, the only chance against systemd is to come up with something technically better. May I ask you to please present technical arguments either against systemd or in favor of alternatives rather than railing against LP or Benno Rice? Because reading what you wrote, I believe I heard a different talk than you have. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo Nowhere does he state that BSD should adopt systemd, but he does point out that BSD is lagging behind Linux on many key fronts: automatic HW and SW system reconfiguration, cgroups, message transport, service lifecycle, automation API and containers, for instance. But nowhere does he peddle systemd to the BSD folks. He instead stated that: (30:26) "systemd makes heavy use of dbus. I'm not a big fan of dbus but i am a big fan of messages. [...] One of the things that I told the BSD people was basically we should write our own message transport. My version, if I were to write one, would be kernel resident rather than user space and would allow a lot more of security and authentication and access control elements on the actual bus endpoints". (33:13) "The barrier to entry for building something on top of it like an appliance is massively reduced. But again systemd doesn't have to be the only implementation of this. You should go and explore". This is technical reasoning, this is pointing out what need to be done to turn the tide on something different, on something better than systemd. He rightly states that better does not necessarily mean "the way it was done before", change is part of life and resisting it just out of aversion to change eventually proves futile. There are points over which I disagree with him, when he states that binary logs are a good idea for instance, but he is damn right that bickering against Poetering's personality or that systemd goes against the principles of Unix as they were laid out 40-50 years ago is a losing proposition. We're talking of software, technology and system services, systemd is leading right now and sysv-init is worthless as a weapon against it. Linux is in need of something better, at least in terms of simplicity and robustness, than systemd. But I still can't see anything capable of taking the lead and gaining back a significant share of the installed base from systemd. Which worries me, because this means that systemd is going to become ever more entrenched in the Linux ecosystem, to the point it might begin to dictate the future evolution of the OS, from the kernel to userland. And still what I hear the most is that systemd stinks because LP is an assh*le or that it violates the Unix philosophy. When I hear people speak of philosophy on technology matters I think they don't have a clue yet they're struggling to prevail on a purely dialectical plane. I've been waiting years for something better than systemd, modern and simpler, more modular, customizable and easier to understand and predict. Years when systemd just got bigger, more tentacular and more widely adopted. And all I got was the same old, static, sclerotic sysv-init. Enough with calling people names when they don't share your attitudes against Lennart Poettering or when they don't blame systemd for the death of the neighbor's cat. What can be used today to replace systemd that was not devised 40 years ago when networks were as static as motorways and external removable devices required a technician to change them? What can be used that will run virtualized, containerized systems just as well, that is easier, more customizable and more reliable? In my current job I manage the less than 10% of the infrastructure that runs on non-Windows systems. They are all systemd systems except two old Sun Solaris boxes. I know that pushing management away from systemd would likely have the effect of pushing them away from Linux altogether, turning the place into a Windows-only business, like most are in Italy. To have a chance I must show that running the Linux boxes without systemd would improve the workflow, ease maintanership, make the boxes more dependable and resilient, make them interact better with the VMWare hosts. I know I cannot. It would take me a lot of time to let them run on sysv-init, I doubt the CentOS boxes can be make run without systemd, some proprietary packages only come with systemd unit files and I cannot produce dbus-events sensitive scripts to replace unit files. And even if I could do it, I'd run the risk of seeing those servers miserably fail a major upgrade in the future, putting Linux and myself in a bad light withing the organization. No way can I justify a switch away from systemd saying that LP is a miserable jerk or that systemd doesn't rely on hundreds of pipelined command-line tools that each does just one simple thing and does it well. I do run Devuan on my personal systems, but I do so because I don't like living inside the monoculture systemd is pushing all the major Linux distributions into, and I enjoy being capable of a deeper control of my systems than systemd allows me. But I know I'm relying on an old piece of software junk that is running well because I'm not running a complex *aaS infrastructure. SysV suits me well for the same reasons ext4 does compared to zfs and script/awk scripts do compared to Python or Go. What is Devuan going to have in the future capable to replace sysv-init and be a considerably more modern approach to system management and services control? I don't know. What I do know is that learning to master systemd is a must to retain my job and to be able to hold any Linux professional certification. And that to change this state of matters will take far more than saying that LP is a jackass and that Thomson and Ritchie would have loathed a systemd-like solution when they developed Unics. -- Alessandro Selli <alessandrose...@linux.com> VOIP SIP: dhatarat...@ekiga.net Chiave firma e cifratura PGP/GPG signing and encoding key: BA651E4050DDFC31E17384BABCE7BD1A1B0DF2AE
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