Re: Init system deba{te|cle}
On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 5:55 AM, John <JohnRChamplin@wowway.com> wrote:
> Could someone who has been following the giant fuss on -devel over
> init systems explain why there's such a sense of dire urgency?
Probably not. At least, it seems incomprehensible to me why there
should even be a debate.
> Is it provoked by systemd's effort to be adopted having at least found
> a home with gnome, made urgent by gnome's status as our default?
I don't even think that has much to do with it.
> Couldn't we just make XFCE the temporary default and stay with
> sysvinit until the technical dust has settled and we have a clearer
> view of the long-term merits of openrc, systemd, and upstart?
Lots of reasons to take Gnome's default deskstop status away, but the
gratuitous dependency on systemd is a good one.
> I'm not close to DD status, so reluctant to ask on -devel. I don't fit
> any of the categories of that debate:
I find your description of the beligerents interesting.
> 1) systemd advocates with few
> reservations about forcing their way,
2) near-adolescent emotional
> responses to anything that looks like forcing.
> Luckily there have
> been a few posts by
> 3) sensible and emotionally moderate folks; it's
> reassuring to see how many of them also hold office in Debian.
>
> But still, I'd like to understand.
Me, too, although I have some observations.
> If you haven't been reading -devel, an overview can be found here
> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=727708 and here
> https://wiki.debian.org/Debate/initsystem.
>
> --
> JohnRChamplin@wowway.com
> ====================================================
> GPG key 1024D/99421A63 2005-01-05
> EE51 79E9 F244 D734 A012 1CEC 7813 9FE9 9942 1A63
> gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --recv-keys 99421A63
I'm a former Fedora user. Got my start on MkLinux and openBSD, but the
companies I worked for seemed to think the commercial support approach
from Red Hat was more in line with what they needed, so I shifted to
Red Hat and followed that line to Fedora. Around Fedora 11 or 13 I
became aware of the talk about upstart, then suddenly there was this
announcement, around Fedora 14:
Rawhide had switched to systemd.
No one seemed to think it necessary to bother with setting up a
parallel track and isolate the community from the bumps. Lennart's way
or the highway.
Good engineers don't do that.
When you rip out a piece like the init system and replace it with
something highly experimental like systemd, you set up a parallel
track. Unless you don't care what happens to your community.
I did a small bit of research, started wondering if there was
something hidden that might involve certain parties who think they
have reason to attempt to submarine the Linux community. Took my
concerns and technical questions to the dev list over there and got
put on the moderator's list. Anything even slightly controversial that
I try to ask over there just doesn't even make it to the list. Did get
one or two replies that my posts were "waiting moderation".
And no good technical reasons, just that the traditional system was
"too complicated".
"Shutdown -h" becomes "systemctl halt" or some such. apachectl
stop/start/graceful, etc.? Now arcane parameters to the systemctl
stop/start/? service-something-or-other. Arcane parameters to
systemctl's new, undocumented (man pages way behind) commands and
parameters. The only way to find out was to guess or ask on the list
and hope someone who know was hanging around, or read the current
code.
I'm repeating myself, but good engineers don't do that.
--
Joel Rees
Be careful where you see conspiracy.
Look first in your own heart.
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