Re: systemd

[Roger Leigh <rleigh@codelibre.net>]

On Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 02:05:15PM -0400, Tom H wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 10:48 AM, Camaleón <noelamac@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I hope sysvinit is still available (and be the default option) for at
> > least a couple of years until systemd is being bright polished by the
> > rest of the other friendly linux distributions >>:-)

It's certainly available for those that wish to test it out, and it's
definitely usable.

> I'd *guess* [...] there are hardly more problems with
> systemd as there are problems with sysvinit on squeeze.

Without any objective evidence, who knows?  systemd is hardly the
only contender as a sysvinit replacement.  There's upstart, openrc
and others.  Which of those is best suited to being the default?

> Had Debian decided a year ago to transition to systemd (not taking
> into account the difficulty of surmounting the opposition of the
> "conservatives" who don't want to transition to anything, of the
> kfreebsd and hurd ports, of the anti-RH crowd, of the anti-Poettering
> crowd, etc), would it have been in a good enough state for a wheezy
> release? Yes IMHO (especially since there'd be testing/unstable
> testers and reporters to add to the Fedora users), certainly no for
> many others... Just because it was first released as a distribution
> default 14/15 months ago doesn't mean that it's hopelessly buggy.

I don't think that anyone at all claims that it's "hopelessly buggy".
Not having had the amount of testing that the alternatives have, it's
certainly not ready to be the default.  Maybe for wheezy+1, but for
wheezy that would be a bit premature, and work is still needed for it
to properly integrate (I only got a patch for update-rc.d and
invoke-rc.d two days back, so if a package wants to update or run its
init scripts or service then it won't work properly when using
systemd).  That's not a problem for just trying it out, but it's
certainly not ready for production use, let alone being the default.

systemd is technically superior on some levels, compared with
sysvinit.  But it's also a lot less flexible, due to swallowing up
many smaller tools and daemons into a single monolithic package.
That has consequences which might not be so great down the line.
See:

http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2012/04/msg00751.html

for my take on this.

This isn't about being "conservative" (though I would hope that in
general our users would appreciate us being conservative--it's one
factor which results in Debian being a solid and reliable system).
It's about taking a longer-term view of what is in *our* best
interest, rather than jumping at the latest cool and shiny thing,
and tying ourselves to the interests of RedHat, which may not be
in our interest at all--it could significantly hamper our ability
to tailor our own distribution for our own needs.


Regards,
Roger

-- 
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