Re: Four people decided the fate of debian with systemd. Bad faith likely
On Sunday, March 02, 2014 10:53:51 AM Jack wrote:
> On 02/03/2014 05:11, Eric Newcomb wrote:
> > Technical issues aside, I went through the list of members of the
> > tech-ctte, found here: https://www.debian.org/intro/organization. I
> > searched each name on the list on Google, and I can't honestly find
> > any evidence that the committee is "stacked" with Redhat and/or
> > Canonical employees. I'd like to see some proof of these assertions
> > before I'd give any credence to claims of conspiracy.
>
> I also disapprove of such claims. It's unfortunate that the CTTE split
> in the way that it did. But I followed the discussion on bug 727708 with
> considerable interest; it was a serious, open technical discussion. You
> need proper evidence, not just suspicions, to start chucking around such
> claims.
>
> > I am not even close to advanced enough to have much of an opinion on
> > the matter, but if anyone would like to explain to me why they feel
> > that System V is superior, I'd be interested to hear your arguments,
> > provided they're based in fact, technical information and practical
> > knowledge, and not in nostalgia, emotion or resistance to change.
>
> First off, I'm not a Debian Developer. The way Debian is constituted,
> it's ultimately up to DDs to decide what direction Debian takes (so I
> understand). So my remarks below should be read in the light of the fact
> I'm not a DD, just a user - I don't speak ith any authority.
>
> I don't believe that SysV is superior to *any* other init system. I
> think very few people are arguing that it's really superior to systemd.
>
> I think it's unfortunate that the CTTE didn't consider OpenRC at all.
>
> Systemd scares me. As far as I can see it does a lot of things right (in
> some cases these are things that no other contender does right); I'm not
> going to try to enumerate those things, that's been one elsewhere. But
> the way systemd has been designed, in particular the way it has borged
> dbus and syslog, is a real problem for me.
>
> I try to build systems that only run those daemons the system really
> needs. This is partly for security, and partly because I have several
> systems that are resource-challenged. Many of those systems have no GUI,
> and until now needed no dbus. I try to run nothing that depends on
> polkit or consolekit (it's a coincidence that those components are also
> Lennart's work).
>
> But the systemd approach is to use dbus for all IPC; and dbus is now
> part of systemd. Dbus is complicated; I don't begin to understand it.
> SystemD places dbus at the heart of PID1, and that IMO was a
> questionable technical decision.
>
> SystemD isn't just an init system; it also uses the CGROUPs kernel
> feature to manage user sessions. I don't understand why that
> functionality was incorporated into the init program. An init system,
> IMO, should restrict itself to bringing up services.
>
> I *really* don't want binary logs. I realise that I can make the new
> journald pass all log output to a text-based syslog daemon; but then I'm
> running a journald that I don't need.
>
> Similarly I have no need for a logind: even those of my systems that
> have a GUI are not multi-seat.
>
> If only systemd had been designed as a smorgasbord - a set of components
> designed to work in concert, but each being susceptible to being omitted
> in favour of its predecessor, then I would have been much less
> uncomfortable about it.
>
> I think it's great that Debian provides the only mainstream platform
> that supports The Hurd an kFreeBSD kernels, although I don't use them.
> The choice of systemd as a default init system will inevitably
> marginalise those kernels in Debian, which I think is sad.
>
> I do hope that those working on writing standalone components that
> implement the various systemd interfaces are successful (and soon). I
> will probably be sticking with Wheezy/SysV as long as possible, or until
> the prospects of those efforts becomes clear. I wish I had the chops to
> contribute to those projects - I believe they have the potential to
> match the strengths of systemd, while avoiding the birds-nest of
> dependencies that makes systemd seem such a heavy, take-it-or-leave-it deal.
>
> Of course, the CTTE's decision concerned the *default* init system for
> Jessie. Other init systems will continue to be packaged. So it's not an
> apocalypse.
>
> But systemd does *so much*, and so many other distros have decided to
> adopt it, that I fear that applications will come to rely on its
> features; the other init systems will be marginalised, and eventually
> wither. We will then all become dependent on Red Hat for a large part of
> our critical infrastructure. Red Hat is a billion-dollar commercial
> operation, with goals that are very different from Debian's. So I fear
> the CTTE's decision may in time come to harm the Debian project.
>
> Anyway, those are some of *my* reasons for viewing the CTTE's decision
> with apprehension. I hope you think they're based in fact, and not
> nostalgia or emotion.
>
> Incidentally, the arguments I've given arise from the way I generally
> use GNU/Linux. People who use GNU/Linux mainly as a desktop, on beefy
> hardware, will tend to have a greater appreciation of systemd's
> strengths, several of which benefit only desktop users.
>
> NOTE that the subject-line is incorrect; *eight* people decided the fate
> of Debian.
While I could go over why I think systemd is the best option, I've already
gone over that.
My only dispute here is that OpenRC shouldn't even be considered. OpenRC is
really just a big initscript wrapper around SysV and doesn't really address
any of the problems for which SysV is being deprecated in Debian and other
Linux distributions. Even OpenRC's champion Gentoo looks like it may be going
systemd.
I don't think we need more and more wrappers around SysV init to cover what a
turd it is, because a wrapped turd is still a turd. Linux needs an actual
system manager, not scripts that are barely up to the task of startup.
Even if we weren't to go systemd, it's still pretty necessary SysV Init is
dropped altogether since it isn't really serving any Linux distribution's
needs adequately anymore, and it's been almost entirely dropped in the real
UNIX ecosphere.
Just my two cents.
Conrad
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