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Re: Installing an Alternative Init?

Marty wrote:

On 11/15/2014 07:45 PM, Ludovic Meyer wrote:

On Wed, Nov 12, 2014 at 12:26:26AM -0500, Marty wrote:

On 11/11/2014 02:16 PM, Brian wrote:
>On Tue 11 Nov 2014 at 12:36:14 -0500, Marty wrote:
>
>>On 11/11/2014 12:07 PM, Laurent Bigonville wrote:
>>>
>>>There are no functional differences between an installation with
>>>sysvinit-core out of the box or an install where sysvinit-core is
>>>installed later, this is a fact.
>>>
>>>Allowing the user to choose this at install time from the interface is 
>>>a "nice to have" feature (wishlist bug) not a RC bug like you were
>>>claiming earlier.
>>
>>There is a potential practical consequence of not advertising an
>>init alternative during setup. It makes users less likely to be
>>aware of it, or even aware that the init system has changed.
>
>New users do not need to be be aware of all the background to the
>choosing of a default init. No advertisement is needed. By definition,
>they do not care. They want Debian. Please let them have it.

They will not care "by definition" only if they are not aware of the
change, and most won't be aware unless they are informed during the
installation.
>>They won't know they lost the choice they didn't know they had. Capisce? 
>
>What choice have they lost?

They lost an *informed* choice. I think the installation program
should not take sides but just inform the user. A choice that the
user is not aware of is the same as no choice, and is potentially
coercive and disrespectful. It makes Debian seem partial to Red
Hat's business plan to take over the Linux ecosystem.


If you care so much about Redhat code, maybe you should document
yourself, and see there pay coders for glibc, gcc, the kernel ( a
ton of them, according to lwn and linux fundations reports ), on
coreutils, gnome, kde, php, python, openssh, etc, etc.


> Whatever it was, it didn't exist as you imply
> in Wheezy.

It wasn't an issue in Wheezy because the default init option had not
changed from the previous release, and any release before that.

>>They won't know, that is, until it bites them somewhere down the
>>line. Then they won't know where to look or who to blame, and will
>>blame Debian.
>
>What bites them?

Individually, probably something that requires sysvinit or one many
core services that got replaced. Collectively, getting trapped by
vendor lock-in.


You keep using those words, but you do not seems to use them correctly.
If the same system is present on more than one distributio, that's not
vendor lock-in since you can switch distribution and then reuse the same
system.
I meant that one vendor seeks to control the Linux ecosystem. Whether that plan is viable or even sane, is another issue, but I am not eager to see if their plan will succeed or be a guinea pin in the experiment.
As much as I dislike systemd, I'm not sure that it's a vendor conspiracy to "control the Linux ecosystem." Yes, redhat pays Lennart Poettering's salary (among others). But... I'm hard pressed to see how turning a collection of free distros into functional equivalent's of redhat, or increasing the resources applied to free distros, is really to their benefit. If anything, it would seem to dilute the competitive advantage of paid RHEL.
Personally, I think it's more a matter of one, prima donna developer, who has the advantage of a salary, who has a vision and design philosophy that he's promoting in a very aggressive and single minded way. And he's very overt about it. (Somebody posted an email from Poettering last week saying, roughly, 'first we're going to get kdbus into the kernel, then we're going to make udev depend on it, and then everyone will have to eat systemd to get udev.' As I recall, the message closed with 'gentoo, be warned.')
I figure this is more a case of redhat management not wanting to tick off valued prima donna, and maybe seeing what he's doing as a contribution to the open source community (to date, redhat has been pretty good about contributing to the community in lots of different ways). Still, if I were in their shoes, I'd be trying to reign the guys in. Given that RHEL's main selling points are enterprise capabilities, quality control, and (for the government market) security accreditation and lots of support, I'd much rather see diversity and weak code spread across competing distributions. 

But then, what do I know?

Miles Fidelman

--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra
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