4 ms·
Systemd is the disaster that happens when we ignore the lessons of UNIX. UNIX is all about small, composable tools. Do one job and do it well. One of these t
by moe 9y ago
Systemd is the disaster that happens when
we ignore the lessons of UNIX.
UNIX is all about small, composable tools.
Do one job and do it well.
One of these tools didn't stand up to the test
of time (SysV init) and needed to be replaced.
We could have chosen one of the mature candidates
(upstart, runit, minit) or even built a great new
one from scratch. Life would have been good.
But instead we ended up with this trainwreck
of a monolith that not only replaced init, but at the
same time tried to reinvent almost every critical
userspace daemon from Syslog to NTP.
It predictably failed on every metric.
Now it is time for the major Linux distributions to
conclude this experiment, roll back the Systemd mistake
and return to the modularity that made UNIX successful.
- Blackthorn 9y agoThis attitude does not match history. If Unix really was about that philosophy, we would have never seen tools like emacs and perl gain any sort of popularity.
- moe 9y agoUNIX philosophy[1] is not about popularity but about choice. We get to choose between Emacs/Vim, Perl/Python, Syslog-ng/RSyslog, ntpd/openntpd and so on. This has resulted in multiple mature implementations for every core system task. Yet instead of sticking with this code that has stood the test of time over decades, we threw it all out for a poorly written jack of all trades that gives root to usernames starting with a digit... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy#Origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy#Origin
- e40 9y agoPerhaps someone can explain why it was chosen as the replacement for SysV init, when all of the parent's comments/critiques of systemd were known in advance of it being pulled into major distros.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- digi_owl 9y agoBundling. systemd as a package is more than just init. It is init, inetd, session manager (logind), udev, dns client, dhcp client, cron, su, and the list keeps growing. Basic thing is that first of all Poettering to it a toehold at Fedora (he works at Red Hat, so surprise surprise). Then he offered Gnome the code for supporting logind on a silver platter. End result is that to offer Gnome as the desktop you either have to patch it, shim it (ask Canonical how well that worked out) or adopt systemd. Effectively what is happening is that Fedora is becoming the de-facto standard for Linux. In part because it is effectively the testing distro for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and thus a large portion of userland devs (and a number of kernel devs) use it as their "dogfood".