Re: Can I still depend on Debian?
Philip Hands p...@hands.com writes: Rhy Thornton r...@scesd.k12.or.us writes: ... More concerning than that is that systemd won't be producing human readable log files. ... (to be fair, I haven't really looked into it yet. I'm busy with real work). I wonder why you feel qualified to comment. :-/ I don't think we should require our users to be qualified in order to ask questions or express concerns about our direction. Users are allowed to be wrong or poorly informed and we shouldn't criticise them for that, just correct them politely. `I've heard that this vacuum cleaner chops the tops off looped carpets.' `That was a problem with one of the early models but we've fixed it now and your looped carpets will be just fine.' (S) -- `Touch can bring blossom to things that decay.' -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/83a93nv6zj@chiark.greenend.org.uk
Re: Can I still depend on Debian?
On 17/11/14 11:08, Joe Neal wrote: Hello all, I've been using Debian since the never-ending Sarge freeze. I've never really used anything else. I presently depend on servers running Debian to pay rent and put food on my table. The thing is, Debian seems to be self-destructing. Can you blame me for wondering if I should upgrade my servers to Jessie when the time comes or migrate them to another distro entirely? Please remember that for every every DD filled with angst over the current state of affairs in Debian, there are many more users, corporate and small business, who depend on it to keep the cashflow going. We need to be able to make concrete plans, and with the present indeterminate state of Debian, we can't do that. Not sure I understand - the Debian Free Software Guidelines and the Social Contract are just about set in stone and nobody is talking about changing them. You can definitely rely on them. Those are the things that bind us together as Debian Developers and those are the things that users are excited about. Politics happens everywhere. Student politics, for example, is infinitely nastier than the politics Debian has seen recently but somehow students everywhere still get their free beers (and bonus hangover) in O-week/freshers week, year after year. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/546d0316.5070...@pocock.pro
Can I still depend on Debian?
Hello all, I've been using Debian since the never-ending Sarge freeze. I've never really used anything else. I presently depend on servers running Debian to pay rent and put food on my table. The thing is, Debian seems to be self-destructing. Can you blame me for wondering if I should upgrade my servers to Jessie when the time comes or migrate them to another distro entirely? Please remember that for every every DD filled with angst over the current state of affairs in Debian, there are many more users, corporate and small business, who depend on it to keep the cashflow going. We need to be able to make concrete plans, and with the present indeterminate state of Debian, we can't do that. It doesn't matter what you decide, but if you don't hurry up and do it, and stick with it, you run the risk of losing a good number of your commercial and enterprise users, becoming largely a hobbyist distribution as a result. I doubt hobbyists contribute much of the donations, hardware, etc, required to keep the lights on around here. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/1416218890.8302.1.ca...@speakeasy.net
Re: Can I still depend on Debian?
Thanks for your mail Joe, On Mon, Nov 17, 2014 at 04:08:10AM -0600, Joe Neal wrote: The thing is, Debian seems to be self-destructing. Can you blame me for wondering if I should upgrade my servers to Jessie when the time comes or migrate them to another distro entirely? As a user, I think you should keep on judging Debian on the basis of the quality of our products (Debian stable seems to be the product you're most interested in), rather than paying too much attention to the amount of Debian gossip that these days seems to be everywhere in the Free Software tech news. If Debian Jessie is good for you, use it. If it is not, don't. In the meantime, as user, you can do plenty to help us helping you, in maximizing the chances that Debian Jessie *will* be a good product, for you and everyone else out there. You can for instance try upgrades to the current testing, and report bugs against ugprade-reports [1] if it didn't work for you; you can try fresh Jessie installations and report bugs against installation-reports [2] to let us know how it went; you can more generally just use the current testing and report bugs or submit patches accordingly. [1]: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=upgrade-reports;dist=unstable [2]: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=installation-reports;dist=unstable In short: if you want to play your user part at its best, just focus on Debian quality and how you can help in maximizing it. It's in your interest, after all (and I suspect it will be overall less work for you than migrating to another distro, YMMV). If, OTOH, you'd like to get more involvement in Debian development, we'll be more than happy to have you! And maybe at that point we can discuss together more in depth about the current state of internal discussions going on in the Debian Project, and how to improve their quality. All the best, -- Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . z...@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o Former Debian Project Leader . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o . « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club » signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Can I still depend on Debian?
I've got the same concerns. I'm also very concerned because apparently the systemd push may happen on servers I already built if I forgot to use Debian Stable, which I may have, because I've never had any issues previous with riding on the edge, and I like to provide feedback upstream where possible. More concerning than that is that systemd won't be producing human readable log files. As a full time sysadmin, I'm reading log files all day, and I have to wonder what the reasoning behind this is (to be fair, I haven't really looked into it yet. I'm busy with real work). More concerning still is the hegemony that Red Hat / Gnome people seem to have developed, and how their tools are now infecting every distro in the world it seems. I can't imagine having this monoculture is going to be good long or short term for the entire infrastructure of all digital tools on the planet. I've administered a ton of Centos and Red Hat machines in my day, and I use Debian specifically for a lot of reasons pursuant to that experience. I haven't commented much on this whole systemd fracas, but your message in particular resonated with me, and now to read about lead after lead stepping down due to this bizarre hurry up offence the systemd crowd seems to be running, I too feel very concerned about my favorite server distro, and the upstream for my favorite desktop distros as well (Mint mostly). One of the things I've relied on Debian the most for is it's slowness, and it's methodical pace of not including controversial things until they have been beaten into the ground by millions and nobody sees an issue with implementation. That just doesn't feel like what is happening here with systemd, and frankly, It's scaring the shit out of a lot of us, and rightfully so. If there *IS* in fact anything to the conspiracy theories about a red hat plant in the Debian camp intentionally screwing things up, he/she should get a raise. They've screwed everybody up royally. If in fact it's just immature naivete or lack of fore thought: *sigh* Once again I'm reminded that we're not far removed from the feces flinging primates from whence our genetic code forked. Rhy -- We are the product of our efforts. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/546a7269.1080...@scesd.k12.or.us
Re: Can I still depend on Debian?
On Mon, 2014-11-17 at 14:10 -0800, Rhy Thornton wrote: More concerning than that is that systemd won't be producing human readable log files. As a full time sysadmin, I'm reading log files all day, and I have to wonder what the reasoning behind this is (to be fair, I haven't really looked into it yet. I'm busy with real work). To be fair, it would be helpful if you _did_ look in to things, before making incorrect statements with such certainty. If you don't get logs as usual via syslog, that's a bug and should be fixed. $ ls -ltr /sbin/init lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 Sep 28 20:33 /sbin/init - /lib/systemd/systemd $ ls -l /var/log/syslog -rw-r- 1 root adm 769029 Nov 17 22:50 /var/log/syslog ii systemd 215-5+b1 amd64system and service manager Regards, Adam (also a sysadmin, reading log files much of the day and busy with real work, including trying to get a release out...) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/1416264978.19889.36.ca...@adam-barratt.org.uk
Re: Can I still depend on Debian?
Rhy Thornton r...@scesd.k12.or.us writes: More concerning than that is that systemd won't be producing human readable log files. Hi Rhy, There is no truth to the rumor that systemd doesn't produce human-readable log files. In a recent discussion on debian-devel, we identified a bug in the current syslog-ng package in jessie that causes syslog-ng to not be started properly under systemd. That may be behind some of the problems that people misinterpreted as being somehow intentional. That bug will be fixed for jessie, and wouldn't have affected people using the default of rsyslog. The systemd journal is supplemental, and can be ignored completely (apart from some rare edge cases involving extremely high log volumes, where you would already be doing custom tuning to make syslog cope). All the log files that you expect to have still are there in the same format they are now. I've been running systemd for about a year now, and don't use the journal at all except via systemctl status. I still grep /var/log because I always take a long time to adopt a new tool. I noticed precisely zero change when switching to systemd. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/87mw7pwgyw@hope.eyrie.org
Re: Can I still depend on Debian?
On Mon, Nov 17, 2014 at 02:10:49PM -0800, Rhy Thornton wrote: More concerning than that is that systemd won't be producing human readable log files. As a full time sysadmin, I'm reading log files There currently is a bug in Debian where your log messages aren't working. I forgot details, but IIRC syslog wasn't running anymore after an updated package. It's a bug. In Jessie you'll have your syslog as well. More concerning still is the hegemony that Red Hat / Gnome people I'm a GNOME release team member. It would be nice to cut the hate, thanks. -- Regards, Olav -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20141117231456.ga25...@bkor.dhs.org
Re: Can I still depend on Debian?
Rhy Thornton r...@scesd.k12.or.us writes: ... More concerning than that is that systemd won't be producing human readable log files. ... (to be fair, I haven't really looked into it yet. I'm busy with real work). I wonder why you feel qualified to comment. :-/ I've only played briefly with systemd, and even I know that one still gets text logs in the default Debian configuration. Once I'm comfortable enough to start putting systemd on servers, I don't expect to be keeping syslog logs around though -- journalctl is clearly more useful. The way that vital information gets scattered around various files has always been a bit of a pain with *syslog. If you spend all day reading logs I'd imagine you'll be able to save yourself some time with journalctl -- you should try spinning up a VM with systemd and have play -- you might find you like it. Also, I'd suggest that you take rumours of the sky falling with a pinch of salt. Even if systemd is discovered to be the worst thing since the black death, it's going to be possible to avoid it in Jessie, and we have LTS now, so you've got many years to think about it, which will also be plenty of time to change direction, if that were to be necessary. Cheers, Phil. -- |)| Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560] HANDS.COM Ltd. |-| http://www.hands.com/http://ftp.uk.debian.org/ |(| Hugo-Klemm-Strasse 34, 21075 Hamburg,GERMANY pgpvdIZ37xw5l.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Can I still depend on Debian?
To the original question - I'm thinking the Jessie is going to be Debian's equivalent of Microsoft Vista. I plan to stay on Wheezy as long as LTS lets me, and wait and see how things shake out. Miles Fidelman -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. Yogi Berra -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/546a9447.20...@meetinghouse.net
Re: Can I still depend on Debian?
On Mon, 2014-11-17 at 14:10 -0800, Rhy Thornton wrote: More concerning than that is that systemd won't be producing human readable log files. As a full time sysadmin, I'm reading log files all day, and I have to wonder what the reasoning behind this is (to be fair, I haven't really looked into it yet. I'm busy with real work). No, in the default install in Debian log files remain as they always have. So they will text, written to separate files. You can of course change this to whatever your favourite logging style is - and that includes systemd binary logs. In fact in the usual Debian fashion from the outside we seem to be chaotically stumbling, but as always it is towards the best technical solution (imho!). And that solution appears to be (fingers crossed): 1. Adopt the best init system as the default for jessie - which happens to be systemd. 2. Arrange things so either systemd or SysV can be used for jessie. [0] 3. Ignore the rest of the stuff that comes with systemd, bar udev and logind. [1] [2] [3] 4. I don't understand why systemd would be important to desktop users, but regardless Debian is throwing those among them who would prefer not to use it a bone by no longer insisting Gnome is the default window manager for new installs. All in all, I don't see how the transition could be done better. I rarely see that in other projects, but after decade or so of using it, it is the standard I have come to expect of Debian. On the other hand, I'm not so proud of the collateral damage we have managed to inflict on ourselves in moving towards this point. In fact it's downright worrisome. But them I'm a newcomer, some perhaps I'll just have to get used to it. [0] Allowing both SysV and systemd is the only sane way to go as systemd hasn't been deployed widely in production servers yet. This gives sysadmins one release cycle to suck it and see. Forcing them to move to a new init system that ended up having unforeseen horrors without providing them a fall back position would be a disaster, for both them and Debian. Needing the fallback seems unlikely of course, and if systemd proves to be as solid as it looks, I'd expect SysV to quietly fade away in stretch. [1] Unfortunately, ignored doesn't mean not installed. If the systemd packaging team had of seen fit to split all the stuff unused by default into separate package(s) I suspect they would removed some of the heat from the transition. That would have made everyone’s lives a little more peaceful, particularly their own. [2] What isn't used is a surprisingly long list. It's covered pretty well on systemd's Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd [3] We will all get to play with the new goodies provided by systemd in jessie for a couple of years. If the consensus is they are indeed better than they things they replace I'd expect to see them to become the default in stretch. signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
