4 ms·
> Interesting. Can you be a bit more specific? What in POSIX does systemd explicitly reject? And might there be a reason for that? The project specifically rej
by msbarnett 5y ago
> Interesting. Can you be a bit more specific? What in POSIX does systemd explicitly reject? And might there be a reason for that?
The project specifically rejects "caring about POSIX" in its entirety. Poettering has discussed this at length[1].
I'm not criticizing systemd here, I'm merely pointing out that Debian is already perfectly fine with shipping non-portable, aPOSIX or even anti-POSIX software by default (which I think is fine), and that the sudden pearl-clutching around `which` not being POSIX is completely inconsistent with many other decisions the project makes and has made.
[1]: https://archive.fosdem.org/2011/interview/lennart-poettering.html https://archive.fosdem.org/2011/interview/lennart-poettering...
"In fact, the way I see things the Linux API has been taking the role of the POSIX API and Linux is the focal point of all Free Software development. Due to that I can only recommend developers to try to hack with only Linux in mind and experience the freedom and the opportunities this offers you. So, get yourself a copy of The Linux Programming Interface, ignore everything it says about POSIX compatibility and hack away your amazing Linux software. It's quite relieving!"
The interview notes various POSIX-incompatibilities as they existed in 2011. They have grown enormously since. It surfaces in userland in a huge number of ways, and *BSD ports maintainers have noted that it's increasingly hard to port any number of things due to the systemd-isms (which now extend to logging, cron, home directories, and many other core functionality replacements) they're baking in.
Again, this is not intended to criticize systemd, but this is precisely the sort of effect that people are hand-wringing about wrt `which` in bash scripts, but nobody is insisting that systemd needs be removed from Debian for having similar POSIX portability impacts. POSIX compatibility has simply never been a meaningful goal of Debian
- orhmeh09 5y agoIf Debian is perfectly fine with anti-POSIX, why go to the effort of making and switching to dash over bash? One of the impetuses for that project was bash’s inability to confirm to posix even when launched in posix mode. What’s that about?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jbovlaste 5y agoUbuntu made the switch to dash back in 2006 to decrease boot times, as dash is much faster than bash. This was upstreamed to Debian. POSIX compatibility made the transition easier (as most scripts were made to run on many Unix systems, not just Linux), but was not the motivation for the switch. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DashAsBinSh https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DashAsBinSh
- mjw1007 5y agoAs I understand it, the main motivations were speed and memory footprint. Might not matter too much on a desktop, but people also use Debian for smaller things like Freedombox.
- marcosdumay 5y agoThe main reason stated at the time was that dash was a much faster executable that would improve the performance on boot and all background tasks.
- effie 5y agoWell Debian isn't some BDFL's project, different authors have different visions that sometimes don't agree with each other. With dash, the original advantages put forward were minimalism, higher speed, and POSIX compliance [1]. But that was a long time ago and when systemd came, the preference for dash may have changed for many Debian authors and maybe dash is just kept in Debian as a token of the past accomplishments. [1] http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/dash/ http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/dash/