4 ms·

> > But (serious question), why does it matter that systemd has an ntp daemon or that it subsumed udev? > What does a time system have to with system start inf

by growse 6y ago

> > But (serious question), why does it matter that systemd has an ntp daemon or that it subsumed udev? > What does a time system have to with system start infrastructure? If you want to write a time daemon, write a time daemon: the chrony folks did, and it's pretty good. Lots of folks have switch away from the old school NTPd to it. Nothing, but you're making the common mistake of thinking that systemd is an init system. It isn't. It's a suite of components that more or less can be enabled independently, that no-one's forcing anyone to use. One of these components is an init. Another one in a time sync daemon, etc. etc. Chrony's great, but if you don't need most of its pretty advanced features, why bother? A simpler, smaller, 'good enough' client might be more suitable. Isn't software choice a good thing?

throw0101a 6y ago
> Isn't software choice a good thing? Yes, but tightly coupling can reduce the ability to make a choice.
- growse 6y ago
  I'm not sure how that's true in this case. I personally need the features of chrony, so despite running debian stable / systemd everywhere, I just turn systemd-timesyncd off. Tight coupling would be "you can't boot your system unless you use this time sync daemon implementation".
  - dane-pgp 6y ago
    There are definitely degrees of freedom, and I wonder if it would make sense to extend the Free Software Definition[0] backwards further by adding: * The freedom to not run any program you do not wish to run, for any reason (freedom -1). Presumably Stallman would agree that government-mandated spyware which happened to be GPL licensed would not really be granting users much freedom. The tight coupling of "you can't boot your system unless you use this time sync daemon implementation" might also count as a violation of this hypothetical freedom. Applying this to systemd is more complicated though. I'm sure some people would say "Well it's released under a Free Software licence so you can remove or replace any part of the code you don't want.", but that seems almost as unhelpful as saying "Microsoft Windows is Free Software because you can always create a clean-room reimplementation of it". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition

by growse 6y ago

throw0101a 6y ago

> Isn't software choice a good thing? Yes, but tightly coupling can reduce the ability to make a choice.

growse 6y ago
I'm not sure how that's true in this case. I personally need the features of chrony, so despite running debian stable / systemd everywhere, I just turn systemd-timesyncd off. Tight coupling would be "you can't boot your system unless you use this time sync daemon implementation".
- dane-pgp 6y ago
  There are definitely degrees of freedom, and I wonder if it would make sense to extend the Free Software Definition[0] backwards further by adding: * The freedom to not run any program you do not wish to run, for any reason (freedom -1). Presumably Stallman would agree that government-mandated spyware which happened to be GPL licensed would not really be granting users much freedom. The tight coupling of "you can't boot your system unless you use this time sync daemon implementation" might also count as a violation of this hypothetical freedom. Applying this to systemd is more complicated though. I'm sure some people would say "Well it's released under a Free Software licence so you can remove or replace any part of the code you don't want.", but that seems almost as unhelpful as saying "Microsoft Windows is Free Software because you can always create a clean-room reimplementation of it". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition