Re: Init system deba{te|cle}
On Sat, Nov 2, 2013 at 12:23 PM, Joel Rees <joel.rees@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
This is nonsense.
Fedora 14 was slated to default to systemd but at the last minute,
FESCO decided not to go ahead with systemd and the init system change
was reverted; to upstart not to sysvinit.
So there was a fallback...
Fedora prides itself on being a bleeding-edge distribution and it
takes risks. Sometimes the risks that it takes are too much of a
gamble. Fedora 18 was about two months late because the anaconda
developers chose to change both the frontend and the backend of the
installer without a fallback to the Fedora 17 installer (because they
didn't have the resources to maintain both the old and the new code).
> 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".
Misrepresenting what systemd is and the reasons for its existence
doesn't make sense:
http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html
OS X and Solaris switched to launchd and smf respectively in 2005 and,
to borrow an expression from Asterix and Obelix, "the sky didn't fall
on their heads." Modern nix systems need a more sophisticated
"/sbin/init" and associated executables and they need (and have needed
for a long time) something more reliable and maintainable than a bunch
of dash/bash scripts to bring the system up. Linux is playing catch-up
in this field and I'm glad that upstart and systemd are dragging it
out of the dark ages, even if it's kicking and screaming irrationally.
> "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.
You can use "shutdown ..." and "systemctl halt"/"systemctl poweroff",
as well as "apachectl ...".
There was a problem in the run-up to Fedora 14 in that the
systemd-supplied shutdown didn't understand traditional switches and
it was patched within a few days of a bug report being filed.
I don't understand your complaint about documentation because
systemd/systemctl are unusually well documented; and were so from the
very beginning.
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