7 ms·

IMHO sysvinit and systemd both suck in that they're both overly obscure, overly arcane, overly complex, and poorly documented. Systemd replaces a legacy pile of

by api 11y ago

IMHO sysvinit and systemd both suck in that they're both overly obscure, overly arcane, overly complex, and poorly documented. Systemd replaces a legacy pile of hacks mess with an over-engineered tower of babel mess. An improvement would be something with modern syntax, sparse features, and good docs.

secstate 11y ago
Amen sir. Seems crazy that the tipping point for the OP was being able to require certain services to have come up before others. That seems a fairly elementary aspect of process supervision. For my money, runit gets the nod for modern syntax, sparse feature ... docs are coming along ;)
exabrial 11y ago
My personal opinion is it's Redhat's way of seizing control of the Linux ecosystem... But that's a fringe theory
- felixgallo 11y ago
  hardly fringe -- it's straight out of the unix wars historical playbook. Every unix vendor tried to make their own conflicting systems in order to promote lock-in. Solaris, AIX, DG/UX, SCO, everyone, all the time. That it's taken so long in the Linux space is pretty amazing, but of course that it's happening is super depressing.
  - marcosdumay 11y ago
    That requires the systems to be proprietary, and, well, conflicting. Systemd isn't proprietary, and with everybody's adoption it's now universal, not conflicting. I'm not sure where this tendency of Red Had for taking over the ecosystem comes from. The only rational basis for it I can think of is they wanting Linux to stay complex, so they can sell support. But it's way more likely it comes simply by them hiring a big number of developers, and not having enough in-house problems to solve - after that they must lead, not follow (for marketing reasons), so they must push their solution onto everybody.
    - michaelmrose 11y ago
      Conway's law Organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations It could be that they both benefit from building complex systems and believe honestly that such systems are the optimal solution from their own perspective. This requires no bad faith or conspiracy theories. Its simultaneously possible that such a complex solution is sub optimal for other parties. They are under no obligation to build a solution that is best for other parties and others are under no obligation to adopt or like such solutions. Its entirely possible for two parties to disagree without either being evil.
      - digi_owl 11y ago
        In regards to this, i ran into a blog posting over at blogs.gnome.org, about Fedora's workstation project. That alone should raise some red flags about mixing roles. But then i start reading and seeing the guy name others from seemingly unrelated projects, thanking them for their efforts. But lo and behold, once i start running the bloggers name, and the names he mentions, they all come up as Red Hat employees.
    - nickpsecurity 11y ago
      "That requires the systems to be proprietary, and, well, conflicting." No it doesn't. Different OSS projects already compete with each other in many details of design and implementation. They try to win over users or mindshare instead of dollars. Some with financial backing also have dollars in mind. Even lock-in is approximated by things that many apps depend on but are too big to change without risking a break.
      - zanny 11y ago
        But this kind of competition, or even intent behind a product, is thus not unethical or harmful to the users. Let systemd try to take over whatever it wants. It is still LGPL licensed, so I can do whatever I want with it as well. Those writing it can do whatever they want - nobody has forced any distro to adopt systemd bseides Red Hat themselves, insofar as it was their project principally so of course their own distro used it. Arch, Suse, Debian, Ubuntu... all game to use it under consensus. I personally think there is no better outcome than well engineered and linked software seeing uniform adoption to let the ecosystem move on to bigger problems. The degree to which systemd's pervasiveness has enabled the vast simplification and feature richness of so many disparate aspects of development on the platform only reinforces that belief - the ease of writing and shipping service, socket, requires, triggers, timer, mount, etc files. The ubiquitous availability of a session dbus. udev pervasiveness, cgroups already being there and setup, there is so much feature richness systemd gives everyone up the stack to claim shell scripts and grit were better is to say you should never stop reinventing the wheel to build the cart until the wheel is cast from solid gold.
- AckSyn 11y ago
  Personally, I'm waiting for Linus Torvalds to make his own init system in the event he's fed up with all the sysvinit and systemd bullshit. Linux Kernel. Git. $torvaldsinitsystem ?
  - ktRolster 11y ago
    He's not going to because it doesn't affect him personally. And let's be honest, systemd isn't that bad, and has some benefits. It's not worth getting religious over. You'll know there are too many dependencies on systemd when people who don't want it (Devuan, Slackware, openBSD) can't boot a decent system without it. I don't think we're in danger of that: people who don't want systemd don't need it.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - txutxu 11y ago
    I could see sysvinit as $torvaldsinitsystem because it has been booting linux around the world... Git did start as a tool, and has been extended, a lot. The same than the kernel booting was extended across the years to cover usage cases. If he writes pid 1 code by itself, to get rid of a issue, as he did with the kernel and with git, we will call it the Linus pid 1. But as others said, maybe he doesn't has personally annoying issues with this.
  - TheyW0ntL1sten 11y ago
    He's actually said that he doesn't think that systemd is that bad. He didn't like the way that they submitted patches initially. He said that he doesn't have a problem with the approach and he said that people make too much of the "unix philosophy" because passing bits of text between programs really hasn't been the way that unix systems have been designed for several decades.
pmoriarty 11y ago
Have you tried runit?[1] [1] - http://smarden.org/runit/ http://smarden.org/runit/
SEJeff 11y ago
On your Linux system, type: man -k systemd There is extensive and well written documentation for all aspects of systemd so I'm going to call BS on your post. Also, the syntax is consistent and documented. It is infinitely simpler than sysvinit. Either you're trolling, or know very little about systemd. Note that I'm a fan, but far from an apologist.
- ktRolster 11y ago
  Here's the documentation for systemd-random-seed: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-random-seed.service.html https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-ran... What are the command-line options that are available to that tool? Without looking in the source code. >Note that I'm a fan, but far from an apologist. An apologist is merely someone who offers a defense of something. It comes from the greek word ἀπολογία, "speaking in defense". Thus you are an apologist, even though you're not dogmatic.
  - SEJeff 11y ago
    Ok I'll give you that. Also up vote for the pedantic retort. Well written, and I don't know Greek, so I learned something new. Look at the docs for something like systemd-service or -exec or -tmpfiles, etc. You found one that as bad. I'm sure you can find a few more. Now find docs for some random 1000 line shell scripts that aren't the code. At least there is a very obvious and consistent way to set the ulimit for my services, even if they don't support pam_limits via systemd, or an obvious way to extend the start script without hacking up the init file, etc. Please allow me to rephrase and say the documentation overall is so far ahead of th documentation for any implementation of init scripts and sysvinit it isn't funny. And this is coming from someone who spent most of his career as a UNIX / Linux SysAdmin.
    - ktRolster 11y ago
      Also up vote for the pedantic retort. Nah, it wasn't meant as a retort. It was merely an aside that I thought you might find interesting. And apparently you did :)
ams6110 11y ago
http://man.openbsd.org/rcctl http://man.openbsd.org/rcctl
- JdeBP 11y ago
  Because the BSDs don't agree amongst themselves on how services are configured in /etc/rc.conf , OpenBSD (whose tool this is) being a major outlier, this tool does not interoperate at all well with anything other than OpenBSD. For those with OpenBSD habits, there is a compatibility shim in the nosh toolset that translates to native nosh mechanisms. * http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/Softwares/nosh/guide/rcctl.html http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/Softwa...
lomnakkus 11y ago
> IMHO sysvinit and systemd both suck in that they're both overly obscure, overly arcane, overly complex, and poorly documented. Systemd replaces a legacy pile of hacks mess with an over-engineered tower of babel mess. This is an easy criticism to make. What's no so easy is to actually implement what's needed for a modern system and still achieve what you seem to be asking for. Modern systems are unbelievably complex beasts. > An improvement would be something with modern syntax, sparse features, and good docs. This is getting pretty silly and it just looks like you're reaching for anything to criticize here. What does "modern syntax" mean and why would it be an improvement on the INI-like syntax of systemd configuration? What earth does "sparse features" mean? You don't want to support everything that a modern system requires? (Take modern system to mean everything from containerized servers to desktops to laptops to a mobile phone. All places where systemd has its place.) You don't think systemd has "good docs"? IME Systemd has unbelievably good reference documentation for any type of Free Software (in the Unix style of man pages, no less!). Perhaps tutorial-like documentation is somewhat lacking, but the "systemd for Administrators"[1] blog series is pretty good IMO. (Though, granted, a bit out of date, perhaps.) [1] http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd-for-admins-1.html http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd-for-admins-1.html
- snuxoll 11y ago
  Speaking from experience, classic sysvinit was the bane of my existence when trying to deploy Python web applications. Having to use things like supervisor because writing init scripts is such a pain is a hack, nothing more. Writing a 10 line systemd unit file packaged in with the RPM I use to deploy my app is much less of a headache, and I welcome the change - combined with parallel startup I don't have to block nginx from loading while my application loads (or vice-versa).
  - nitrogen 11y ago
    Ubuntu's Upstart was also pretty nice in this regard.
    - themartorana 11y ago
txutxu 11y ago
When I was a child, I did translate knoppix boot messages, to my mother language, for a local project. In colours. For me was great and rewarding, a nice learning experience, about livecd's initialization and linux in general at the time. I don't feel like I could have accomplished the same experience trying to do the same with systemd (with my age and knowledge and resources at the time). Still more difficult, being a Debian user, where systemd is not in the same shape than RHEL based distros, and documentation is out of sync, or missed in blogs... What you propose reminds me to openrc or the gentoo dependency based init system. I Love too the BSD/Slackware/busybox init style (single script init). But I'm a scripting mad. One of my reasons to live, of and for, opensource, is the ethics and freedom behind it. Other one was being more K.I.S.S. on my system interactions than with MS based products. I feel capital interests hurts some things very hard to obtain, in voluntary groups of people, using guerrilla warfare, and without any care. Eventually I've deployed some Debian stable (Jessie) systems with sysvinit this same year, and I'm grateful that people in Debian did that option possible. I'm not sure if a third, or a new option with modern syntax and sparse features as you say, could be better than the years we've been moving the world using sysvinit or upstart or others... but we, the tech people, seem to like new things! Totally agree about the docs care, specially when there are distributors involved. When there are changes in opensource, there should be a lot of more care IMHO than in closed products, and this is not always the case. Unfortunately people, by brain nature, is driven a lot by media and marketing, two weapons of venture capital techs. And if service providers insert X and media inserts X, people who did never maintain a critical and complex deployments using X and did integrate a lot of things with them, starts talking about the smell of the clouds. What implementation do you suggest, to reach what you propose? I think is not easy :) My main feature request could be: reliable and malleable (not easy too). > An improvement would be something with modern syntax, sparse features, and good docs. Loved your tower of babel mess definition, upvoted just by that comparison. Have a nice day.
- JdeBP 11y ago
  > I'm not sure if a third, or a new option [...] as you say, could be better than the years we've been moving the world using sysvinit or upstart or others * 1. System 5 rc * 2. upstart * 3. systemd * 4. "third, new, option" The "Uselessd Guy" critiqued the thinking that underlies this strange way of counting to three that is being employed here, in http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/ http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/ . See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11641426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11641426 on this very page.

by api 11y ago

secstate 11y ago

Amen sir. Seems crazy that the tipping point for the OP was being able to require certain services to have come up before others. That seems a fairly elementary aspect of process supervision. For my money, runit gets the nod for modern syntax, sparse feature ... docs are coming along ;)

exabrial 11y ago

My personal opinion is it's Redhat's way of seizing control of the Linux ecosystem... But that's a fringe theory

felixgallo 11y ago
hardly fringe -- it's straight out of the unix wars historical playbook. Every unix vendor tried to make their own conflicting systems in order to promote lock-in. Solaris, AIX, DG/UX, SCO, everyone, all the time. That it's taken so long in the Linux space is pretty amazing, but of course that it's happening is super depressing.
- marcosdumay 11y ago
  That requires the systems to be proprietary, and, well, conflicting. Systemd isn't proprietary, and with everybody's adoption it's now universal, not conflicting. I'm not sure where this tendency of Red Had for taking over the ecosystem comes from. The only rational basis for it I can think of is they wanting Linux to stay complex, so they can sell support. But it's way more likely it comes simply by them hiring a big number of developers, and not having enough in-house problems to solve - after that they must lead, not follow (for marketing reasons), so they must push their solution onto everybody.
  - michaelmrose 11y ago
    Conway's law Organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations It could be that they both benefit from building complex systems and believe honestly that such systems are the optimal solution from their own perspective. This requires no bad faith or conspiracy theories. Its simultaneously possible that such a complex solution is sub optimal for other parties. They are under no obligation to build a solution that is best for other parties and others are under no obligation to adopt or like such solutions. Its entirely possible for two parties to disagree without either being evil.
    - digi_owl 11y ago
      In regards to this, i ran into a blog posting over at blogs.gnome.org, about Fedora's workstation project. That alone should raise some red flags about mixing roles. But then i start reading and seeing the guy name others from seemingly unrelated projects, thanking them for their efforts. But lo and behold, once i start running the bloggers name, and the names he mentions, they all come up as Red Hat employees.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    "That requires the systems to be proprietary, and, well, conflicting." No it doesn't. Different OSS projects already compete with each other in many details of design and implementation. They try to win over users or mindshare instead of dollars. Some with financial backing also have dollars in mind. Even lock-in is approximated by things that many apps depend on but are too big to change without risking a break.
    - zanny 11y ago
      But this kind of competition, or even intent behind a product, is thus not unethical or harmful to the users. Let systemd try to take over whatever it wants. It is still LGPL licensed, so I can do whatever I want with it as well. Those writing it can do whatever they want - nobody has forced any distro to adopt systemd bseides Red Hat themselves, insofar as it was their project principally so of course their own distro used it. Arch, Suse, Debian, Ubuntu... all game to use it under consensus. I personally think there is no better outcome than well engineered and linked software seeing uniform adoption to let the ecosystem move on to bigger problems. The degree to which systemd's pervasiveness has enabled the vast simplification and feature richness of so many disparate aspects of development on the platform only reinforces that belief - the ease of writing and shipping service, socket, requires, triggers, timer, mount, etc files. The ubiquitous availability of a session dbus. udev pervasiveness, cgroups already being there and setup, there is so much feature richness systemd gives everyone up the stack to claim shell scripts and grit were better is to say you should never stop reinventing the wheel to build the cart until the wheel is cast from solid gold.
AckSyn 11y ago
Personally, I'm waiting for Linus Torvalds to make his own init system in the event he's fed up with all the sysvinit and systemd bullshit. Linux Kernel. Git. $torvaldsinitsystem ?
- ktRolster 11y ago
  He's not going to because it doesn't affect him personally. And let's be honest, systemd isn't that bad, and has some benefits. It's not worth getting religious over. You'll know there are too many dependencies on systemd when people who don't want it (Devuan, Slackware, openBSD) can't boot a decent system without it. I don't think we're in danger of that: people who don't want systemd don't need it.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- txutxu 11y ago
  I could see sysvinit as $torvaldsinitsystem because it has been booting linux around the world... Git did start as a tool, and has been extended, a lot. The same than the kernel booting was extended across the years to cover usage cases. If he writes pid 1 code by itself, to get rid of a issue, as he did with the kernel and with git, we will call it the Linus pid 1. But as others said, maybe he doesn't has personally annoying issues with this.
- TheyW0ntL1sten 11y ago
  He's actually said that he doesn't think that systemd is that bad. He didn't like the way that they submitted patches initially. He said that he doesn't have a problem with the approach and he said that people make too much of the "unix philosophy" because passing bits of text between programs really hasn't been the way that unix systems have been designed for several decades.

pmoriarty 11y ago

Have you tried runit?[1] [1] - http://smarden.org/runit/ http://smarden.org/runit/

SEJeff 11y ago

On your Linux system, type: man -k systemd There is extensive and well written documentation for all aspects of systemd so I'm going to call BS on your post. Also, the syntax is consistent and documented. It is infinitely simpler than sysvinit. Either you're trolling, or know very little about systemd. Note that I'm a fan, but far from an apologist.

ktRolster 11y ago
Here's the documentation for systemd-random-seed: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-random-seed.service.html https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-ran... What are the command-line options that are available to that tool? Without looking in the source code. >Note that I'm a fan, but far from an apologist. An apologist is merely someone who offers a defense of something. It comes from the greek word ἀπολογία, "speaking in defense". Thus you are an apologist, even though you're not dogmatic.
- SEJeff 11y ago
  Ok I'll give you that. Also up vote for the pedantic retort. Well written, and I don't know Greek, so I learned something new. Look at the docs for something like systemd-service or -exec or -tmpfiles, etc. You found one that as bad. I'm sure you can find a few more. Now find docs for some random 1000 line shell scripts that aren't the code. At least there is a very obvious and consistent way to set the ulimit for my services, even if they don't support pam_limits via systemd, or an obvious way to extend the start script without hacking up the init file, etc. Please allow me to rephrase and say the documentation overall is so far ahead of th documentation for any implementation of init scripts and sysvinit it isn't funny. And this is coming from someone who spent most of his career as a UNIX / Linux SysAdmin.
  - ktRolster 11y ago
    Also up vote for the pedantic retort. Nah, it wasn't meant as a retort. It was merely an aside that I thought you might find interesting. And apparently you did :)

ams6110 11y ago

http://man.openbsd.org/rcctl http://man.openbsd.org/rcctl

JdeBP 11y ago
Because the BSDs don't agree amongst themselves on how services are configured in /etc/rc.conf , OpenBSD (whose tool this is) being a major outlier, this tool does not interoperate at all well with anything other than OpenBSD. For those with OpenBSD habits, there is a compatibility shim in the nosh toolset that translates to native nosh mechanisms. * http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/Softwares/nosh/guide/rcctl.html http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/Softwa...

lomnakkus 11y ago

> IMHO sysvinit and systemd both suck in that they're both overly obscure, overly arcane, overly complex, and poorly documented. Systemd replaces a legacy pile of hacks mess with an over-engineered tower of babel mess. This is an easy criticism to make. What's no so easy is to actually implement what's needed for a modern system and still achieve what you seem to be asking for. Modern systems are unbelievably complex beasts. > An improvement would be something with modern syntax, sparse features, and good docs. This is getting pretty silly and it just looks like you're reaching for anything to criticize here. What does "modern syntax" mean and why would it be an improvement on the INI-like syntax of systemd configuration? What earth does "sparse features" mean? You don't want to support everything that a modern system requires? (Take modern system to mean everything from containerized servers to desktops to laptops to a mobile phone. All places where systemd has its place.) You don't think systemd has "good docs"? IME Systemd has unbelievably good reference documentation for any type of Free Software (in the Unix style of man pages, no less!). Perhaps tutorial-like documentation is somewhat lacking, but the "systemd for Administrators"[1] blog series is pretty good IMO. (Though, granted, a bit out of date, perhaps.) [1] http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd-for-admins-1.html http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd-for-admins-1.html

snuxoll 11y ago
Speaking from experience, classic sysvinit was the bane of my existence when trying to deploy Python web applications. Having to use things like supervisor because writing init scripts is such a pain is a hack, nothing more. Writing a 10 line systemd unit file packaged in with the RPM I use to deploy my app is much less of a headache, and I welcome the change - combined with parallel startup I don't have to block nginx from loading while my application loads (or vice-versa).
- nitrogen 11y ago
  Ubuntu's Upstart was also pretty nice in this regard.
  - themartorana 11y ago

txutxu 11y ago

When I was a child, I did translate knoppix boot messages, to my mother language, for a local project. In colours. For me was great and rewarding, a nice learning experience, about livecd's initialization and linux in general at the time. I don't feel like I could have accomplished the same experience trying to do the same with systemd (with my age and knowledge and resources at the time). Still more difficult, being a Debian user, where systemd is not in the same shape than RHEL based distros, and documentation is out of sync, or missed in blogs... What you propose reminds me to openrc or the gentoo dependency based init system. I Love too the BSD/Slackware/busybox init style (single script init). But I'm a scripting mad. One of my reasons to live, of and for, opensource, is the ethics and freedom behind it. Other one was being more K.I.S.S. on my system interactions than with MS based products. I feel capital interests hurts some things very hard to obtain, in voluntary groups of people, using guerrilla warfare, and without any care. Eventually I've deployed some Debian stable (Jessie) systems with sysvinit this same year, and I'm grateful that people in Debian did that option possible. I'm not sure if a third, or a new option with modern syntax and sparse features as you say, could be better than the years we've been moving the world using sysvinit or upstart or others... but we, the tech people, seem to like new things! Totally agree about the docs care, specially when there are distributors involved. When there are changes in opensource, there should be a lot of more care IMHO than in closed products, and this is not always the case. Unfortunately people, by brain nature, is driven a lot by media and marketing, two weapons of venture capital techs. And if service providers insert X and media inserts X, people who did never maintain a critical and complex deployments using X and did integrate a lot of things with them, starts talking about the smell of the clouds. What implementation do you suggest, to reach what you propose? I think is not easy :) My main feature request could be: reliable and malleable (not easy too). > An improvement would be something with modern syntax, sparse features, and good docs. Loved your tower of babel mess definition, upvoted just by that comparison. Have a nice day.

JdeBP 11y ago
> I'm not sure if a third, or a new option [...] as you say, could be better than the years we've been moving the world using sysvinit or upstart or others * 1. System 5 rc * 2. upstart * 3. systemd * 4. "third, new, option" The "Uselessd Guy" critiqued the thinking that underlies this strange way of counting to three that is being employed here, in http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/ http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/ . See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11641426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11641426 on this very page.