4 ms·

Personally, I would have been ecstatic to see systemd if it hadn't have been tied directly to GNOME and thereby installed by every distribution that wanted to i

Personally, I would have been ecstatic to see systemd if it hadn't have been tied directly to GNOME and thereby installed by every distribution that wanted to include GNOME. My main gripe with systemd is that every other system the main author of systemd has written has made my computer inoperable time and time again. I would have liked to have a choice of using systemd or waiting until I saw it become mature enough that I trusted it. I just didn't want to be forced to use it in case history repeated itself. Opting out of systemd is ridiculously difficult due to that GNOME tie-in. It's one of the most important parts of my system. I still would prefer not to have systemd, but I will admit that it works reasonably well for my purposes. I'm pretty upset about how it all went down, but that's life in the fast lane I guess. Where are the days when everybody ignored Linux? I should move to BSD ;-)

vetinari 10y ago
The Gnome developers were asking for years for someone to step in and maintain ConsoleKit. Nobody did and there wasn't any hope somebody would. So they took plan B and used logind, which is part of systemd. People are still free to develop shims that would work with other init systems - but so far nobody is willing to do that.
- thejosh 10y ago
  It's sometimes easier to complain loudly on message boards.
- wott 10y ago
  And the one supposed to maintain ConsoleKit, who abandoned it, was... a certain Lennart Poettering.
  - belovedeagle 10y ago
    How... convenient.
  - jsight 10y ago
    How terrible is it that he maintained a replacement for it instead?
  - Xylakant 10y ago
    please elaborate, why exactly was he supposed to maintain it? Did we as a community pay him for that? Did anybody else pay him for that?
  - mattnewton 10y ago
    Yes, it was all part of his evil plan to.. write what he thought a better overall system would be, and give it to the community for free?
  - mikekchar 10y ago
    As annoyed as I am with the situation, I actually have a hard time blaming this entirely on Lennart Poettering. Red Hat pays for this development (as they do with quite a lot of GNOME). How many project managers are going to go and say, "No. You must spend more time to decouple system X from system Y even though it provides us absolutely no value as an organisation." He's doing his job and he's nowhere near the worst lead developer I've ever seen ;-) The main problem is that, as the responder to my comment said, there are not enough outside developers getting in there and fixing the problem. I am included in the list of people who could fix it, but won't because I have other things to do. It doesn't stop me complaining about it, though. I don't think the complaints are counter productive either, if they are aimed in the right place: Red Hat. Blaming Lennart is useless, whether or not it is fair. It's Red Hat's behaviour that needs to change, because if they replaced Lennart tomorrow the new person would have a mandate to do exactly the same thing.
microcolonel 10y ago
To me, one of the greatest weaknesses of OpenBSD (and I say this as an avid OpenBSD user) is not having a system manager like solaris smf or systemd. Launchd is a pain to configure, so I don't really consider it a solution. Opting out of systemd is hard because systemd is the only package which actually solves these problems reliably, and is enthusiastically maintained. Logind is the only maintained implementation of ConsoleKit. xinetd works fine, but it operates outside the loop of the system manager, which makes socket activated services harder to monitor and configure and prevents them from being started before xinetd itself. Say what you will, but systemd is relied upon because if they didn't rely on it, the functionality they need would not be found elsewhere. I think these are all growing pains. As the system gets more complex, we are starting to realize that we can't afford to maintain two or three wrappers and sets of configs for the device manager process; we can't afford to maintain a handful of different metadata-enhanced logging systems in each daemon; we can't afford to maintain adapters and configs for a bunch of login managers. This is exactly the same kind of pain which made portable UNIX an overnight commercial success. People yearned not to have to maintain a port for every computer they run on. Today they yearn not to have to have to ask five daemons different questions for the same answer.
- JdeBP 10y ago
  It can have a service manager. I have an OpenBSD machine where it has. A system manager is a little more difficult. The problems range from outright missing stuff to hurdles that could be overcome given a large amount of work. * https://www.mail-archive.com/supervision@list.skarnet.org/msg01308.html https://www.mail-archive.com/supervision@list.skarnet.org/ms... * http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/openbsd-binary-packages.html#Limitations http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/openbsd-binary-packages.html...
- makomk 10y ago
  Take a look at the function signatures of the dbus API that logind exposes, and it should rapidly become obvious why they are no other implementations.

vetinari 10y ago

The Gnome developers were asking for years for someone to step in and maintain ConsoleKit. Nobody did and there wasn't any hope somebody would. So they took plan B and used logind, which is part of systemd. People are still free to develop shims that would work with other init systems - but so far nobody is willing to do that.

thejosh 10y ago
It's sometimes easier to complain loudly on message boards.
wott 10y ago
And the one supposed to maintain ConsoleKit, who abandoned it, was... a certain Lennart Poettering.
- belovedeagle 10y ago
  How... convenient.
- jsight 10y ago
  How terrible is it that he maintained a replacement for it instead?
- Xylakant 10y ago
  please elaborate, why exactly was he supposed to maintain it? Did we as a community pay him for that? Did anybody else pay him for that?
- mattnewton 10y ago
  Yes, it was all part of his evil plan to.. write what he thought a better overall system would be, and give it to the community for free?
- mikekchar 10y ago
  As annoyed as I am with the situation, I actually have a hard time blaming this entirely on Lennart Poettering. Red Hat pays for this development (as they do with quite a lot of GNOME). How many project managers are going to go and say, "No. You must spend more time to decouple system X from system Y even though it provides us absolutely no value as an organisation." He's doing his job and he's nowhere near the worst lead developer I've ever seen ;-) The main problem is that, as the responder to my comment said, there are not enough outside developers getting in there and fixing the problem. I am included in the list of people who could fix it, but won't because I have other things to do. It doesn't stop me complaining about it, though. I don't think the complaints are counter productive either, if they are aimed in the right place: Red Hat. Blaming Lennart is useless, whether or not it is fair. It's Red Hat's behaviour that needs to change, because if they replaced Lennart tomorrow the new person would have a mandate to do exactly the same thing.

microcolonel 10y ago

To me, one of the greatest weaknesses of OpenBSD (and I say this as an avid OpenBSD user) is not having a system manager like solaris smf or systemd. Launchd is a pain to configure, so I don't really consider it a solution. Opting out of systemd is hard because systemd is the only package which actually solves these problems reliably, and is enthusiastically maintained. Logind is the only maintained implementation of ConsoleKit. xinetd works fine, but it operates outside the loop of the system manager, which makes socket activated services harder to monitor and configure and prevents them from being started before xinetd itself. Say what you will, but systemd is relied upon because if they didn't rely on it, the functionality they need would not be found elsewhere. I think these are all growing pains. As the system gets more complex, we are starting to realize that we can't afford to maintain two or three wrappers and sets of configs for the device manager process; we can't afford to maintain a handful of different metadata-enhanced logging systems in each daemon; we can't afford to maintain adapters and configs for a bunch of login managers. This is exactly the same kind of pain which made portable UNIX an overnight commercial success. People yearned not to have to maintain a port for every computer they run on. Today they yearn not to have to have to ask five daemons different questions for the same answer.

JdeBP 10y ago
It can have a service manager. I have an OpenBSD machine where it has. A system manager is a little more difficult. The problems range from outright missing stuff to hurdles that could be overcome given a large amount of work. * https://www.mail-archive.com/supervision@list.skarnet.org/msg01308.html https://www.mail-archive.com/supervision@list.skarnet.org/ms... * http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/openbsd-binary-packages.html#Limitations http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/openbsd-binary-packages.html...
makomk 10y ago
Take a look at the function signatures of the dbus API that logind exposes, and it should rapidly become obvious why they are no other implementations.