Public
Jan 22, 2013
Some people are confused. And others are confused and write about it, like for example in this "Linux Future" posting.
I really like how "FLOS" uses "D-Bus" but no "sockets"... I wonder what how he thinks D-Bus transfers its data... Also, udev uses dbus now, as he claims. That's news to the udev maintainers though... I also like how he touts that FHS was UNIX even though only Linuxes adopted it and the actual true UNIXes never bothered with this. Also nice that he claims the usr-merge was non-UNIX, even though the real UNIXes Solaris and AIX did it years ago. Then, "loginctl ignores the old UNIX ways". Ahem, and I thought with logind we brought back multi-seat from the good old UNIX times and made it a first class citizen again.
This ongoing claim that systemd was "monolithic" and in that regard not UNIX, is slowly getting boring. systemd is a suite of various tools and daemons, written to work nicely together, living in a single repo. We copied that scheme actually from the BSDs, where they also develop and maintain their stuff much closer together and keep it in a single CVS.
The guy really confuses "How Linux did it traditionally" with "UNIX" even though the development of systemd and what he calls "FLOS" which he alludes to be non-UNIX comes much closer to how the real UNIXes are developed.
The whole discussion might even be interesting, if it mattered at all whether something was UNIX or not. Turns out it doesn't really, unless your religion is UNIX.
I really like how "FLOS" uses "D-Bus" but no "sockets"... I wonder what how he thinks D-Bus transfers its data... Also, udev uses dbus now, as he claims. That's news to the udev maintainers though... I also like how he touts that FHS was UNIX even though only Linuxes adopted it and the actual true UNIXes never bothered with this. Also nice that he claims the usr-merge was non-UNIX, even though the real UNIXes Solaris and AIX did it years ago. Then, "loginctl ignores the old UNIX ways". Ahem, and I thought with logind we brought back multi-seat from the good old UNIX times and made it a first class citizen again.
This ongoing claim that systemd was "monolithic" and in that regard not UNIX, is slowly getting boring. systemd is a suite of various tools and daemons, written to work nicely together, living in a single repo. We copied that scheme actually from the BSDs, where they also develop and maintain their stuff much closer together and keep it in a single CVS.
The guy really confuses "How Linux did it traditionally" with "UNIX" even though the development of systemd and what he calls "FLOS" which he alludes to be non-UNIX comes much closer to how the real UNIXes are developed.
The whole discussion might even be interesting, if it mattered at all whether something was UNIX or not. Turns out it doesn't really, unless your religion is UNIX.
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Hi there.. reading all this is so much fun .. and sad at the same time 8)
It would be even more fun when people would use the energy they use to start discussions about the (pros and) cons of one system vs. the other for developing alternatives or improving some stuff they really care and like.. If somebody does not like one software/distribution/way of doing things he is free to use (and hopefully support) another software/..
But it is really sad that - in every public discussion about systemd - I only see people loving/defending it or people hating it from the bottom of their hearts.. 8(
Blaming the author that he does not really understand/know what the Unix philosophy may or may not be, does not help. If you focus on the real issue he may have, you end up with a guy who can not do stuff the way he was doing it before. Why? Because everything has changed..And it was easier to add a user to some "camera" group to let him access some hardware.. So the discussion as I see it is in fact something like "things were easier in the past" vs. "things have improved"..
systemd improved a lot of things (at least for me). People just need to understand that improving the usability of a systemd enabled system is an ongoing process. I use systemd since v15. So removing the need of appending .service when starting a unit already was a great improvement in usability for me 8) But I still can't do anything I could do with the old fashioned init-scripts..! Do I miss them? No! Not at all 8) Do I get blamed for the systemd integration in our systems? Every single day! Do I care? Yes.. but I just fix the issues that arise. Sometimes I do not like the new way - But I know everything is still under development 8) Maybe the day will come, when I complain how stupid and ugly systemd is.. 8) That will be the day when you guys break things I really care about 8)..
From a Systems Engineer point of view I would love to see a version of systemd with long-term support. So that I do not need to change too much when I just want to get rid of some bugs.. It is sometimes hard to defend every change in the system and brief others about the changes made without starting a discussion like this one 8)Jan 23, 2013
+Marius Tolzmann: Do you see anything specific in the referenced article?
Also best not to assume I/people only 'defend'; though +Colin Guthrie does the 95% of the work (for Mageia), I did switch various %configure2_5x things to use systemd. The development version of Mageia has not used ConsoleKit for a while now. Plus every now and then we get hit by bugs, etc.
If you follow the systemd mailing list, a complaint of a missing dependency / systemd bloat turned into a patch which changes a Python script into C. Seeing things like this make me question people who say that the systemd mailing list is bad.Jan 23, 2013- +Olav Vitters as I understand the referenced article, it is about tons of frustrating issues the author may have with newer systems and especially those running systemd 8) The article is not helpful at all. It just describes issues and at the end it is full of (partly) wrong conclusions.. 8) But this is just my interpretation of the content 8)
I did not mean "only" defend.. I myself always need to "defend" my decision to use systemd in our systems among my colleagues for some time now.. It is not always easy to discuss issues they have with systemd.. I am totally pro systemd - just to be clear.
What I see is that in the comments section of the article many people agree with the author. It is just my personal guess that they agree to the "things used to be easier" content.. People in general don't like changes, i think.. 8) And many people like to complain about changes they do not like.. 8) Most of the time this is not constructional (?) and does not help at all.. But please do not forget that not everybody can be a pro in system administration.
If development goes as fast as it does in systemd (and replacing init scripts, adding logind, adding journald, adding seats, adding whatever feature you can think of in only 2 years is quiet fast) some people just can not follow.. and If someone was used to add people to some 'camera' group to give them remote access to whatever, he gets "pissed" if by default only some active session gets access to it and the old way does not work anymore.. This is just human 8) What I missed in some discussion in the past was just some insight like "Hey! This article is somehow embarrassing, but.. hmm.. ..maybe he got a point (somewhere). Maybe all this stuff is not as intuitive for a 'normal' user as it used to be.." But all this can't be solved by (systemd) developers/maintainers - I guess.
What I tried to say: If someone is already "pissed", it does not help to tell him in detail that he does not understand what he is talking about.. Sometimes it may help to mention that he is wrong and invite him to state his issues in an appropriate way on the mailing list or somewhere else and that there are people to help him to get over it 8) Things change. 8)
BTW the mailing list is great. And I personally liked the patch that changed systemd-analyze into a C program, too. And I can confirm that everybody who asks nicely always gets a competent answer to any issue they have.
And in general I agree with nearly every decision that was made during the systemd development process till now. And I like the way +Lennart Poettering tries to explain all changes made and their background in the many blog posts..Jan 23, 2013 
+Jon Dowland Oops, terribly sorry about that confusion. The last sentence is strictly the opinion of the lwn.net comment writer, and self-declared kernel hacker, viro. I have no idea, which is why I was asking for someone more knowledgeable to comment. What I should have said is "why is he also claiming cgroups is so badly written?". Normally I ignore unsubstantiated opinions like this, but the writer claims to be a kernel hacker, so presumably has looked at the code. We use ubuntu on our systems, and when I first read about systemd I did comment on the ubuntu-devel-discuss that it would probably be more sensible to abandon upstart and switch to systemd unless there were compelling technical reasons not to do so. No technical reasons were offered other than the blather Shuttleworth repeats in this article:
http://lwn.net/Articles/494082/
OTOH, having choice is good until the dust has settled. Most of the criticisms of Upstart I've seen, e.g. it's nearly impossible to figure out what the actual sequence of service initializations is from the /etc/init conf files were all things I brought up years ago on the unbuntu-devel-discuss list.Jan 24, 2013
+Patrick Goetz That wouldn't happen to be THE Al Viro we are talking about, would it?Jan 24, 2013- +Michael Vehrs All I know about this individual is that the user name on lwn.net is viro.Jan 31, 2013
