Re: Installing an Alternative Init?
On Tue, Nov 18, 2014 at 12:41:14AM +0300, Reco wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 17, 2014 at 07:15:38PM +0100, Ludovic Meyer wrote:
> > On Mon, Nov 17, 2014 at 06:29:24PM +0300, Reco wrote:
> > > Hi.
> > >
> > > On Sun, Nov 16, 2014 at 03:48:34PM +0100, Ludovic Meyer wrote:
> > > > On Sat, Nov 15, 2014 at 09:41:23PM -0500, Miles Fidelman wrote:
> > > > > 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.
> > > >
> > > > Why would the management of a external company care about what
> > > > happen in Debian ?
> > >
> > > Because Debian is upstream for several critical RHEL parts, such as
> > > shadow (passwd, useradd and friends).
> >
> > 1 ( ie shadow-utils ) is not "several".
>
> Google is your friend. Sorry, could not resist.
I spend time to give concrete response. It would be polite to do the same.
>
> > And by having a critical look at your affirmation, RH is paying a lot
> > of upstreams contributors for several critical Debian part :
> > - glibc
>
> Not as of Wheezy. Wheezy uses eglibc.
> And, while we're on topic of glibc - RedHat isn't writing new 'Modern'
> libc to replace an old one. Yet.
That doesn't change the fact that before, this was glibc, with the
infamous Ulrich Drepper, and that eglibc is now merged in glibc.
> Next few years we may see systemd-libc if things go as they're going
> now.
>
>
> > - gcc
>
> A GNU project. Not a RedHat pet.
Read again :
"RH is paying a lot of upstreams contributors"
GCC was pushed historically by cygnus, and cygnus got
acquired by RH.
If you look at the committers, you would see lots of
people from the company.
>
> > - util-linux-ng
>
> A kernel.org project. Not a RedHat pet again.
https://git.kernel.org/cgit/utils/util-linux/util-linux.git
Look who make release, look where he work.
In fact, by that same reasoning, we can say that systemd is
a freedesktop.org project, whic is not more
controlled by RH than stuff hosted on kernel.org.
>
> > - kernel
>
> A joint project, controlled by Torvalds & co. RedHat is one of the few
> who's playing a major role there, true. But that role was not enough to
> push the most controversial features (kdbus, for example) into the
> mainline.
Kdbus is pushed by Greg Kroah-Hartman, who is employed by the Linux Foundation.
Before, he was working at Novell, and has no link with RH afaik.
> > - udevd
>
> Yup. You nailed that one if we consider latest udev development. It took
> a merging into systemd to became that way.
Mhh no.
http://blog.bofh.it/debian/id_442
Looking at the graph made by the debian maintener, we can see that
more than 95% of the system have it installed since 2008.
> Keep shooting, and you may score a couple of more hits ;)
That's not a constest, I am not keeping score.
>
> > to name a few. I could name a few non critical stuff, from gnome, openjdk.
>
> GNOME is can be considered to be controlled by RedHat indeed.
> OpenJDK - please. Java is Oracle's turf, not a RedHat one. RedHat
> invented their own Ceylon language just because of that fact.
Indeed, I wanted to say icedtea.
>
> > So I am not sure that your point is valid. Given the size of Redhat,
> > I also suspect that having someone working on shadow-utils wouldn't be a problem. Judging by
> > SEC fillings, public information, there is around 6900 people.
> > 1 more coder is not a stretch at all.
>
> No doubt this number includes a small army of corporate drones, janitors
> and security guys.
> Do you have any estimate on a number of real developers in Red Hat?
How would I ?
Go find a Redhat developper and ask.
The best approximation you can have is see how many offer there is for technical
people on the website vs others type.
Or dig in the SEC fillings, if you are familliar with the domain ( I work in
a bank, so that's not hard for me to read and see what I need to look at ).
You would see in the 10-Q report of July that there was a increase of
$17.2 million for employee compensation in sales/marketing,
$16.1 million for R&D,
$3.3 millions for general/admin.
So if you believe the sales/marketing are paid as well
as developpers, that's roughly equivalent. If you take in account
the fact that there is likely more developpers than commercials people
in country like india,
czech republic or china, and they are cheaper, then there is more developpers.
So if we split, I would say 10% in general ( human ressources, recruiting, like
internal information services, and accounting, physical security and real estate ).
Then, 45% between R&D ( ie developper, etc ) and sales/marketing.
So that's around 3100 based on the estimation of 7000 people, with let's say
5 or 10% of errors. Now, you have to guess where support and consulting
go in that scheme.
But again, go find a Redhat guy, they are inundating some events like Fosdem.
> > > And, curiously enough, systemd's
> > > goal is to replace those parts (see "Revisiting How We Put Together Linux
> > > Systems" at http://0pointer.net/blog ).
> > > Apparently, management doesn't like to be left out of control :)
> >
> > This is free software, there is no way to be left out of control.
>
> For a fellow developer - sure, there's no way to be out of loop as long
> as said developer plays by upstream rules.
People could fork. There is more than Veteran Unix Admin that can do that,
people with enough money can do it. See ubuntu for a very crude example.
See EDF for another example of distribution adaptation as people who follow
the various minideconf knows. See mate for a few
people deciding to fork a dead project ( or cinnamon ).
It is neither hard or uncommon depending on the project. If one single
guy was able to fork systemd in uselessd, imagine what one or twi full time dev can
do.
> > That's the whole point of the movement, provided you can code of course.
> > A lot of people seems to totally forget that point.
>
> But for a typical management drone - it seems we're both agree that
> there's such a way. All it takes is inability to code.
As likely counting as management drone ( current title being Technical
Manager dealing with my team ), I can tell that you have usually budget
to pay if you can justify to your boss why it would be needed.
At least in a company with enough money, and having read the sec filling,
I suspect that Redhat do seems to have enough money for hiring a coder.
Maybe not immediatly, but given their hiring spree as it can be seen in
older SEC filling, that's a given.
> So my point is simple. You mix a few really good developers and an army
> of managers. That's a modern RedHat.
For what proportion, and based on what data ?
So far, I sourced all of my affirmations, so please do the same.
> >
> > > And of course, another distribution = testing a product for free.
> >
> > I wonder how, since Debian is lagging so much behind that even
> > RHEL 7 is released with systemd.
>
> By reading users' bug reports. RHEL has a limited choice of prebuilt
> software, therefore a limited number of usecases.
Then they wouldn't be interested in use case they didn't support from
the start, so any extra testing, especially extra testing on a different version
wouldn't give much help.
> Besides, RHEL7 is supported until 2024 (IIRC). There's plenty room for
> small improvements.
IIRC the presentation they did at my work, that's 2024 + 3 years
if you pay enough.
At least, that's the case for RHEL 6, and I do not
see why it would be different.
> > I wonder even why they
> > still have jobs posting for QA people if all is needed is to have users of
> > others distributions.
>
> I haven't imply that offloading beta-testing to the community mutually
> exclusive with internal testing :)
But we can agree that community feedback do not replace internal testing.
And given that competitor like Novell or Oracle also ship systemd ( and
soon Canonical ), the testing do benefit to all of them. It also
benefit to community distribution who then become more serious competitor.
If it benefit to one, it benefits to the others.
> > > > People keep wanting the project to be free of corporate influence, but
> > > > it seems that some wouldn't be against having a bit of corporate influence if the
> > > > influence was in the way they want..
> > > >
> > > > > 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.
> > > >
> > > > Canonical was criticized for keeping their code for their ( mir, unity ),
> > > > and Redhat would be criticized for not keeping the code only for them.
> > >
> > > No. RedHat is criticized for pushing their code to everyone and their
> > > dog.
> >
> > People keep saying that, but none show no conclusive proof. Just stating
> > it doesn't make it true. And it doesn't resist simple inquiry such as:
> >
> > "if they wanted to push it everywhere, why would it be non portable to
> > BSD ?"
>
> Because BSD 'market share' is irrelevant at RedHat's turf. See AT&T vs
> BSDi case dated '92.
I fail to see the relation. That case was closed years ago, and there is lots of companies
using BSD without any trouble. Lots of security appliance are running BSD so
the lawsuit is kinda forgotten from people mind.
Can you clariffy ?
> And, of course, writing a non-portable code is much easier than a
> portable one ;)
So is not caring about others distributions, yet someone did.
> > We go back to criticize everything that happen, that's getting old.
> > And kinda poisonous, looking at the people leaving TC or Debian or maintainership.
>
> People leaving Debian's TC is a sad thing to me too. But I don't read
> debian-devel to have my own opinion for the reasons of leaving.
> All I see that DD's that actively promoted systemd in the past are
> leaving now. If I had the mood I'd even came up with some kind of crazy
> conspiracy theory.
You do not need to read debian-devel. LWN make good summaries
http://lwn.net/Articles/621003/
http://lwn.net/Articles/620879/
http://lwn.net/Articles/620878/
or developpers blog :
https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/on_leaving/
> > > And it started way before systemd (dbus, hal and pulseaudio to
> > > name a few). At least Canonical keeps their 'innovations' to themselves
> > > last time.
> >
> > So you agree with me.
> > If you share, you are criticized, if you don't, you are criticized.
>
> They say they don't judge the winners. Last few years Canonical cannot
> be considered to be one.
>
>
> > > > I guess there is no good way for a company to make free software that
> > > > change something in the core of existing ecosystem.
> > >
> > > Take a look at IBM, Oracle and Novell, you may reconsider your statement.
> >
> > I fail to see what did they tried to change in the core ecosystem exactly.
>
> So, judging by your next points, you have no objections against IBM.
Not much. That's a big mess from inside, but like any company
as I discovered later.
> > Oracle is attacked by everyone for the stewardship leading to forks on mysql
> > and openoffice, among others. They even alienated their own community on solaris.
>
> And every time one's using rpm-based distribution one's using
> Oracle-controlled BerkleyDB.
That's seriously not the best example, see oracle latest trick on the license
( http://lwn.net/Articles/557820/ ) in the latest major release.
And berkeley DB was started by a university, then sleepycat
software maintained it, that was acquired by Oracle in 2006.
> And Oracle's own Chris Mason single-handenly wrote btrfs, now a favorite
> FreeDesktop toy.
Not really. Josef Bacik ( Redhat ) was also working a lot on it.
Chris Mason left Oracle for Fusion IO in 2012, and Josef bacik left RH to join him.
Then Chris joined Facebook in december 2013, followed again by Josef.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTUzNTE
I can also ensure that Chris was not working alone on btrfs in Oracle.
> And of course, there's libaio, written by Oracle guys long time ago.
>
>
> > Novell was criticized for providing Mono, and providing software written in mono
> > for gnome ( thus changing part of the core of Gnome ), and was criticized for
> > trying to get Microsoft working on interoperability.
>
> And, at the same time:
>
> Novell was THE Xen's leading distribution back in the old day.
And they dropped as RH acquired Qumranet and pushed KVM in kernel
for RHEL 6. While I must admit that KVM is nifty, Xen still have the
leading edge when it come to new concepts like unikernel, who permit
to have a rather impressive density in computing cluster. But I digress.
> Novell was the company designed heartbeat.
Sure, they did lot of stuff around, but what controversial changes
did they push ? Alas, Novell/SUSE did got a few stuff rejected upstream.
Example, their improved menu for gnome was not merged :
https://en.opensuse.org/GNOME_Main_Menu
XGL was "supsersed" by AiGLX.
> Considering mono as a 'change in the core ecosystem' is to stretching
> things a bit IMO :)
It indeed depend on what ecosystem we are speaking and I should have been clearer.
In my case, this was gnome ecosystem, by pushing for having mono as a blessed language for the
core platform of Gnome.
> > So sure, not changing anything in the core is the right way to avoid some critics. Obviously,
> > haters still find their way, even when they have the choice.
>
> There's one thing that they fail to understand at RedHat - there's
> absolutely no need for the change to be disruptive.
As we say in french, on fait pas d'ommelete sans casser des oeufs.
> And haters - yes, haters gonna hate.
>
> Reco
>
--
l.
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