Re: Stretch & Safely Replacing systemd?
On Fri, 03 Mar 2017 07:25:13 -0500 The Wanderer <wanderer@fastmail.fm>
wrote:
> On 2017-03-02 at 13:01, Patrick Bartek wrote:
>
> > I've been considering Stretch as a clean install or dist-upgrade of
> > my aging Wheezy desktop setup as well as to install on a new
> > notebook I've yet to decide on. I don't like systemd (why is
> > unimportant to this query). I plan to use some other init system,
> > probably runit. So ...
> >
> > Just how dependent has Stretch's system become on systemd? I don't
> > mean applications or GNOME, etc. with systemd dependency that I can
> > choose not to install, but the system itself, the guts, the basics,
> > the things and tools it needs to work properly.
>
> There are two packages which are in some sense "part of" systemd which
> you will not be able to avoid: libsystemd0 and udev.
udev I knew about. (Also, udisks2.) But there are udev alternatives
that don't have any systemd dependency. One is eudev from the
Gentoo people, IIRC. It's suppose to be platform independent..
> libsystemd0 is the "detect at runtime whether systemd is present"
> library; it's what makes it possible for programs to use systemd when
> it's there, but still work when it isn't. It might _technically_ be
> possible to avoid this, but one of the packages which depends on this
> is xserver-xorg-core, so for most systemd that will not be a practical
> option.
Had heard about that dependency. I'm sure there are others
that have yet to be discovered. That's one of the reasons I dislike
systemd.
> udev wasn't originally a systemd thing, but is now maintained by the
> systemd people, and apparently shipped from the same source package
> (or at least I can't see any other reason why changes to udev would
> appear in apt-listchanges under the name of "systemd").
>
> Those are the only systemd-related packages on my current primary
> machine (unless you count systemd-shim, which exists specifically to
> make avoiding systemd itself possible), and I've been running it with
> no apparent related issues for pretty much the entire time since the
> systemd transition.
Know about systemd-shim from my tests with Jessie.. Read some time
ago, it was to be dropped from Stretch.
>
> I do have to keep an eye on 'apt-get dist-upgrade' and on normal
> package installs to make sure that nothing pulls in libpam-systemd
> and then systemd automatically - but it's been quite a while since
> anything tried to do that, and even that would only get systemd as a
> "normal" daemon rather than as the init system.
>
> systemd as the init system is provided by the systemd-sysv package. I
> have that package pinned to never install in /etc/preferences:
>
> Package: systemd-sysv
> Pin: version *
> Pin-Priority: -1
>
> but this doesn't seem to be entirely effective in some cases, for
> reasons I've given up on trying to track down; still, it may be
> making a difference.
All that's why I consider systemd so insidious. It forces you to use it
whether you want to or not. Something Microsoft has been doing to
their users for decades. ;-)
Thanks for all the great info.
B
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