2 ms·

I absolutely love systemd and journald. The fact that you can do most things declaratively and have a common interface for logs, it's just beautiful. I can do t

by atonse 6y ago

I absolutely love systemd and journald. The fact that you can do most things declaratively and have a common interface for logs, it's just beautiful. I can do things like "show me the logs for this service for the last 5 mins". I still don't fully understand why people prefer bash scripts. But then again, I have never once needed to edit those bash scripts since I usually don't stray too much from defaults.

dale_glass 6y ago
It all depends of course on what you do. When you try to ship stuff for various Linux distros, having to figure out how SuSE, Red Hat and Ubuntu like doing their init scripts is a pain. Admin-wise it's nice not to ever have to look at a 3-way merge of stuff in /etc/init.d if somebody touched anything, and then the system was upgraded. But besides that there's lots of cool benefits. Like not needing to deal with PID files, the fact that you always know what a random process belongs to, and that if you want to stop something, nothing will be left behind. Plus all the nice resource limits, auto-restart and other useful parameters that can be applied to anything.
- atonse 6y ago
  It may make the lives of distro developers harder, but doesn't it make the lives of sysadmins (of which are probably 100,000x more than distro developers) easier? And we always wax poetic about how doing things in a declarative way ultimately leads to a better experience. So I am always perplexed when people give systemd a hard time when that's exactly what systemd has done, it's established a standard and consistent way to declare services. Speaking of other things that seem to not want to change, why in 2021, a decade after PowerShell, do we still pipe unstructured text between processes and perform gymnastics with sed/awk/print, does that not just feel extremely janky to people? I'm not remotely a fan of Windows servers, but PowerShell got this right from day one since it started from scratch with the idea of piping objects back and forth. Can we not as a community at least have standardized flags to output the various standard commands as maybe JSON? and take inputs as JSON as well? maybe this has already been tried but I don't see it.

by atonse 6y ago

dale_glass 6y ago

It all depends of course on what you do. When you try to ship stuff for various Linux distros, having to figure out how SuSE, Red Hat and Ubuntu like doing their init scripts is a pain. Admin-wise it's nice not to ever have to look at a 3-way merge of stuff in /etc/init.d if somebody touched anything, and then the system was upgraded. But besides that there's lots of cool benefits. Like not needing to deal with PID files, the fact that you always know what a random process belongs to, and that if you want to stop something, nothing will be left behind. Plus all the nice resource limits, auto-restart and other useful parameters that can be applied to anything.

atonse 6y ago
It may make the lives of distro developers harder, but doesn't it make the lives of sysadmins (of which are probably 100,000x more than distro developers) easier? And we always wax poetic about how doing things in a declarative way ultimately leads to a better experience. So I am always perplexed when people give systemd a hard time when that's exactly what systemd has done, it's established a standard and consistent way to declare services. Speaking of other things that seem to not want to change, why in 2021, a decade after PowerShell, do we still pipe unstructured text between processes and perform gymnastics with sed/awk/print, does that not just feel extremely janky to people? I'm not remotely a fan of Windows servers, but PowerShell got this right from day one since it started from scratch with the idea of piping objects back and forth. Can we not as a community at least have standardized flags to output the various standard commands as maybe JSON? and take inputs as JSON as well? maybe this has already been tried but I don't see it.