Re: piece of mind (Re: Moderated posts?)
Joey Hess wrote:
Bas Wijnen wrote:
I'll speak for myself here: I don't really care about the init system.
I am unhappy with the emotions that this debate is causing, but I'm not
very interested in the technical parts. From what I see on the mailing
lists, it seems that a few users are very unhappy and they keep bringing
this up.
<snip>
I'd hope that anyone who has the time and expertise to participate in
1000+ message theads about systemd that dig into the source code and
discuss rather rarified theories of software engineering also feels
empowered to file bug reports and work to get actual problems fixed.
If you do, you will probably feel less need to engage in such threads.
And, if you appreciate this process of how software is improved, you'll
start to, perhaps, become a little bit suspicious that some voting-based
GR process can have as good results overall.
But that is the major objection of those of us who USE Debian -- the
need to do so, particularly when this concerns production servers.
Fourthly, I think that many DDs feel that releasing jessie with systemd
as the default won't make it appreciably harder to revert to
non-systemd-as-default later than it would have been if we stuck with
sysvinit for this release.
Not that it would be easy to ditch systemd. But there's a lot of FUD
going around here about sysvinit support rotting because systemd is the
default, while the fact is that Debian fFreeBSD doesn't have systemd at
all, and all the init scripts will be kept working for that reason if
nothing else. Also, the tech committe decision was that Debian continues
to support multiple inits to the best of our ability[2]. And, the init
scripts are a relatively miniscule portion of the code in Debian, and
don't tend to bit rot much anyway[4].
I've recently seen rumblings about ditching kFreeBSD - for lack of
support. That could easily change the dynamic.
What is really problematic is the language about continuing to support
sysvinit, without what seems to be a firm commitment to do so. Worse,
speaking as a sysadmin, three things really strike me as problematic:
- systemd claims to support some, but not all, functions of sysvinit
scripts -- looks like that's going to impose a lot of system testing
when deploying jessie
- systemd seems to keep changing APIs, leading to,
- systemd-shim remaining out of sync with systemd
Put together - that all says upgrade is going to be a nightmare, that
can't be avoided.
So most of our concern about being locked into systemd is that desktop
environments are coming to require it, and that systemd-shim may be hard
to keep working in the long term. But desktop environments like Gnome
were already requiring systemd before Debian switched to it; Debian
cannot hold back the tide.
Again.. when did the desktop become the priority for Debian. For years,
Debian (and Linux in general) has been most useful in the server
environment. Breaking server deployments, at the expense of the desktop
seems like bad policy.
I'd say that the chances of a GR at this point in the release process
are about 1 in 1000. It'd take 5 DDs simulantaneously having a bad day
like John did, or massive evidence of unhappy users. And I mean, hard
statistical evidence of that on eg [3], not a few users posting
arguments against systemd that are often highly slanted and innaccurate
and have in any case been seen over and over again before.
Unfortunately, I think you're right on this. Which, at least as one
server-side user, leads me to focus my efforts on finding a new platform
that promises more stability in the future. If I have to invest time in
dealing with changes that break backwards compatibility, it's just as
easy to do that for a different platform as it is for Debian. (Migrated
from Solaris to Red Hat, then to Debian -- a pain each time, but
Debian's had a good run - looks like time for something different.)
I am curious about how many other people are busily looking for a new
distribution as a result of this.
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