Re: systemd stance

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi Mitt,

Mitt Green wrote:

Hello everyone,

You've probably heard of all these systemd rants, which are
especially rough in Debian community.


I think they are mostly justified rants and debian got ruined. An 
occasion to "stand up" against that Borg-like startup system, 
de-unixifying, full of bloat and dependencies.




We are having a thread discussing Unix distributions
that have made their decision not to go with systemd
(all threads available at lists.dyne.org). Since systemd
is made for Linux-only (and glibc also I believe), do
you have any opinions on it, regarding NetBSD future
and at all?


I see two issues here:
1) what do do about stuff that depends on systemd (e.g. gnome and 
related apps). This was actually one of the reasons why Debian brought 
systemd in.
2) You may not like systemd approach, but a more modern startup system 
can be done: better dependencies, delayed/background starts, 
parallelism, etc etc. Already Gentoo has OpenRC which is very  nice, but 
not such a monstrum as systemd. Darwin/MacOS have launchd... which isn't 
slim either, but quite fast in startup.


What we have with sysinit is proven, but I think BSD has to come up in 
the long run with a fine solution, in unix and BSD style, 
self-contained,  based up on simple text files (plists? not big XML 
stuff which then needs dependencies), easy to configure, small, 
portable. The question is of course if certain software will *require* 
systemd.


Riiccardo

Re: systemd stance

[Tobias Nygren]

On Mon, 02 Nov 2015 22:40:34 +0300
Mitt Green  wrote:

> Hello everyone,
> 
> You've probably heard of all these systemd rants, which are
> especially rough in Debian community.
> 
> There is a Debian fork, named Devuan (devuan.org) which is
> currently in alpha stage, but is fairly usable (I have it on my desktop for 
> daily usage), that promotes init freedom and
> ships with sysvinit by default?.
> 
> We are having a thread discussing Unix distributions
> that have made their decision not to go with systemd
> (all threads available at lists.dyne.org). Since systemd
> is made for Linux-only (and glibc also I believe), do
> you have any opinions on it, regarding NetBSD future
> and at all?
> 
> As far as I understand NetBSD is made
> to follow Unix philosophy of keeping things simple and
> minimal, which probably excludes software like systemd.

Hello,

Not a stance, just my personal thoughts on the subject:
The BSDs tend to prefer properly engineered solutions, not necessarily
minimalistic ones.

No doubt somebody will at some point write a BSD licensed init(8)
replacement with some degree of builtin hardware peripheral and service
management that could theoretically be included in base. There's
however not much to debate until such suitable BSD licensed init
replacement exists.

I imagine it would be engineered so that it can coexist in the file
system alongside init+rc.d and the kernel would grow a boot option to
toggle which init system to execute.

IMHO from a desktop/mobile usability perspective there are many other
higher value projects that should prioritized before writing a hugely
complex init system just to unify device hotplug and get 5 seconds
faster bootup. (But we might get there some day!)

Kind regards,
-Tobias