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Revisiting How We Put Together Linux Systems
- random28345 10y agoYou know, I think it would be a shorter list if the systemd guys were to enumerate the things they didn't want to control on a Linux system.
- no_protocol 10y ago(2014)
- LeoPanthera 10y agoThank you - I didn't realize this was so old. So knowing that - what happened to this idea? I've never heard of it, so I'm assuming it didn't catch on.
- wmf 10y agoI don't think much development was done on this specific plan but some of the same ideas (minus the btrfs dependency) can be found in OSTree and Flatpak.
- vomitcuddle 10y agoI feel that Nix solves a lot of the same problems in a better way. The ideas implemented in that project have a lot of potential and I wish that the community focused more on user experience for new users. Since I've started using Nix, I had so many cool ideas about what it could be used for. It's a shame that it has such a steep learning curve.
- johnny22 10y agoI'm interested in nix too, but lots of folks still wanna keep their .deb and ..rpm based systems just the way they are, but enhance them. Lots of folks are against a fundamental rethink. It'll have to be introduced a piece at a time (like with snaps and flatpak). Hopefully we'll end up with something like nix in the end.
- SFJulie 10y agoargumentatum ad antiquitatem. It is news in the light of the new events and the constant criticize that 1) systemd really is not living on the same planet anymore; 2) they really don't care about stability 3) they indeed have a secret agenda that is inherently based on both a misunderstanding and a destestation of the unix ways
- icebraining 10y agoWhat argument? It's a custom in HN to put the year in the title. It doesn't imply the article is no longer valid or useful.
- rdtsc 10y ago> The scheme we propose is built around the variety of concepts of btrfs and Linux file system name-spacing How many here use Btrfs in production. Facebook does I think. Who else? Tying something to the filesystem seems a good way to optimize and get a lot of benefit without too much work. But only if that file system is already prevalent. But I am a bit worried about Btrfs. Is there even a consensus on Btrfs being "the future". There was at some point I think. I've seen https://bcache.evilpiepirate.org/Bcachefs/ https://bcache.evilpiepirate.org/Bcachefs/ touted as the "future" of FS on Linux. EDIT: Oh 2014. Well it's already 2017 so the question is even more relevant regarding where do we see Btrfs heading?
- pfranz 10y agoI don't really have any deep insight into the status of Btrfs. A few years ago I was playing around with my Raspberry Pi and it required me to build the newest kernel just to work--I also remember hearing they wouldn't take bug reports until you were using bleeding edge tools. Not very comforting if you were looking to roll out into production. On the flip-side, Synology just rolled out Btrfs in and update and I'm pretty sure it's the default partition type going forward. They don't expose all the fancy features like dedup, but the fact it's default shows some confidence. So it sounds like it's being actively developed and getting closer to being trustworthy.
- newman314 10y agoSynology has had btrfs for a while. Their latest release just made it available for more models. That said, when I bought a 916 last year, I ended up sticking with just ext4 as I needed something that would definitely work. I anticipate that I will at some point switch over.
- johnny22 10y agoDon't the opensuse folks still ship it by default?
- LeoPanthera 10y agoThey do.
- Arizhel 10y agoI think a lot of things he listed in how things currently are (under "Upstream Projects") are either wrong or overblown. For instance, the claim that the Linux packaging scheme doesn't work for proprietary, closed-source software. That's just plain wrong. No, proprietary software makers can't rely on distribution maintainers to package their stuff, however there is nothing preventing them from packaging it themselves, and making it available in a 3rd-party repository. Both deb/apt and rpm/yum have had this facility for ages, and it's how a lot of Linux users get either software not supported by the distro (like media stuff that Fedora refuses to include), or software that the distro drags its feet on updating. Proprietary vendors can easily use the same system to make their software available to users, and to allow the software to be easily kept up-to-date using the existing system instead of running a separate "update checker" constantly in the background like is common on Windows systems. The main problem is that there's more than one Linux distro out there, and they're not compatible with each other. But as Google does already with Google Earth and Chrome, for instance, it's not that hard to just target RH/Fedora and Debian/Ubuntu/Mint. Another important point is libraries. They complain about the library dependencies all being different on different distros. But there's nothing stopping proprietary vendors from statically-linking everything, which is how they usually do it anyway, both on Linux and on Windows. Sure, it bloats up the binary, but it avoids a lot of library version and dependency problems, and with modern HD and RAM sizes, it's not that much of an issue. It seems to me that they're proposing an enormously complicated and bloated system here in an effort to increase usage of desktop Linux, but this isn't going to help.
- emmelaich 10y ago> Proprietary vendors can easily use ... > there's nothing stopping proprietary vendors ... Yeah but they don't which is the whole point.
- xorblurb 10y agoSome of them do. Likewise, proprietary vendors can "easily" publish UWP programs for Windows. They don't. Well I'm exaggerating a little, actually some of them do.
- AdieuToLogic 10y agoFrom TFA: The systemd cabal (Kay Sievers, Harald Hoyer, Daniel Mack, Tom Gundersen, David Herrmann, and yours truly) recently met ... If this isn't an insight into the mindset of a person, nothing is.
- SFJulie 10y agoIt made me think of the fortune: Wouldn't you be paranoid if every one was against you? Except this time, it is much more Wouldn't you believe systemd is Cabal when the authors say so?
- icebraining 10y agoShould we be judging Elon Musk as a mafioso[1] too? It's called self-deprecating humor. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal_Mafia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal_Mafia
- webaholic 10y agoNot the first time that a systemd talk proposal by Poettering got rejected from LPC. I wonder why his proposals keep getting rejected when they are so tied to the plumbing layer?
- jwatte 10y agoWhy a new partition type and reliance on btrfs? I've had real problems with btrfs fairly recently. Can't all this be achieved with containers and file system overlays already?
- throw7 10y agobtrfs is a non-starter. i stopped reading there.
- znpy 10y ago> btrfs is a non-starter. i stopped reading there. Pottering is one of those "works for me" guys.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- znpy 10y agoI have mixed feelings about posts like this. On one hand I am excited by all these amazing things GNU/Linux will be able to do. On the other hand, I often miss those simpler times in which you could install Slackware, boot it and now pretty much exactly what was running, where, how and why. I'm not telling I want to go back though... Nowadays I can buy a not-so-old laptop, burn an Xubuntu usb stick and pretty much assume everything is going to work. I guess we will have to accept a tradeoff like this.
- nwmcsween 10y ago1. Fix FHS: * abi/$triplet/{bin,sub,lib,int} Respectively binaries, private binaries, libraries, interfaces (headers) 2. Create a constraint based language to express package dependencies and make the deps fine grain (as in separate runtime from buildtime, etc). 3. Either make union mounts a first class citizen or restrict what an application can see via containers and part-out a complete system via containers instead of creating a complete system piecemeal.