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> Systemd was the second attempt at a new init system. The writing had been on the wall for a while for sysvinit, it just turned out that upstart wasn't really

by sofixa 2y ago

> Systemd was the second attempt at a new init system. The writing had been on the wall for a while for sysvinit, it just turned out that upstart wasn't really fixable. Later, when systemd started trying to unify more aspects of the distro, a lot of the conventions that were adopted didn't even come from Red Hats distros. It was still mostly driven by Red Hat people, most notably a guy who was terrible at taking feedback, and proposed "solutions" for security vulnerabilities which were bullshit ("just update systemd", as if you can just do that on any distro). For years systemd had pretty terrible downsides (you know how it deals with conflicting dependencies? randomness! Because that's what you need for an init system, random ordering), yet RH and the person in charge refused to listen. That all the software RH made/sponsored had some advantage or another over alternatives doesn't change my initial point - Fedora, and RHEL, are full of RH alternatives to existing software. Yeah, Podman is better than Docker in some ways, but RH still removed user's choice by forcing their half baked "drop in replacement" that for multiple years couldn't do half of what the predecessor did. Nowadays Podman is decent, but it has been the forced default for how long now?

bonzini 2y ago
> It was still mostly driven by Red Hat people Why does it matter? They were trying to solve a real problem, and decided to dig themselves out of the hole that was upstart. I'm not even sure if Fedora or Arch adopted systemd first, but it was pretty close either way. And Podman (which I admitted was at least partly not-invented-here) was a default but not "forced". I used Docker for years on CentOS 7, and only switched to Podman when it got better than the competition. You mentioned exactly three cases, of which one was not even Red Hat, and that's being "full of RH alternatives to existing software"?
- sofixa 2y ago
  > I used Docker for years on CentOS 7, and only switched to Podman when it got better than the competition. RHEL 8 and CentOS 8 (for the short life it had) came with Podman as default, with IIRC even aliases of docker==podman.
  - bonzini 2y ago
    That's not "forcing", it's choosing what you ship and especially (since RHEL is a paid product) for what software you're willing to spend money on customer support and feature requests. Fedora has always had Docker and on RHEL you could install it with community support only.
    - sofixa 2y ago
      > That's not "forcing", it's choosing what you ship and especially (since RHEL is a paid product) for what software you're willing to spend money on customer support and feature requests. That's forcing an alternative, inferior in terms of features, tool. Canonical were publicly criticised for switching the Firefox apt release to a Snap for their easier maintenance.. Red Hat replacing Docker and telling everyone it' replaced by Podman, even if Podman could do 1/3 of what Docker could, is pretty similar. And they did the same with the whole ecosystem - buildah is another example of them reinventing the wheel because they just had to. Kaniko exists and works well. Docker build has downsides. But Red Hat just had to build their own one too.
      - bonzini 2y ago
        It's giving an alternative that you can support to your paying customers, over one where you have found out after 5 years of contributions that you weren't welcome. Yes it was inferior but the alternative was nothing at all. Should I remind you of the Docker people showing up at a conference with "I say no to systemd PRs" t-shirts (https://lwn.net/Articles/676938/ https://lwn.net/Articles/676938/)? Also, Kaniko was made public in January 2018. Buildah had its first release in February 2018. It's unfortunate that both exist but so is life, they were developed concurrently even though Kaniko came first by a few weeks. Given the previous experience with Docker I am not surprised they chose to build something integrated with podman.

by sofixa 2y ago

bonzini 2y ago

> It was still mostly driven by Red Hat people Why does it matter? They were trying to solve a real problem, and decided to dig themselves out of the hole that was upstart. I'm not even sure if Fedora or Arch adopted systemd first, but it was pretty close either way. And Podman (which I admitted was at least partly not-invented-here) was a default but not "forced". I used Docker for years on CentOS 7, and only switched to Podman when it got better than the competition. You mentioned exactly three cases, of which one was not even Red Hat, and that's being "full of RH alternatives to existing software"?

sofixa 2y ago
> I used Docker for years on CentOS 7, and only switched to Podman when it got better than the competition. RHEL 8 and CentOS 8 (for the short life it had) came with Podman as default, with IIRC even aliases of docker==podman.
- bonzini 2y ago
  That's not "forcing", it's choosing what you ship and especially (since RHEL is a paid product) for what software you're willing to spend money on customer support and feature requests. Fedora has always had Docker and on RHEL you could install it with community support only.
  - sofixa 2y ago
    > That's not "forcing", it's choosing what you ship and especially (since RHEL is a paid product) for what software you're willing to spend money on customer support and feature requests. That's forcing an alternative, inferior in terms of features, tool. Canonical were publicly criticised for switching the Firefox apt release to a Snap for their easier maintenance.. Red Hat replacing Docker and telling everyone it' replaced by Podman, even if Podman could do 1/3 of what Docker could, is pretty similar. And they did the same with the whole ecosystem - buildah is another example of them reinventing the wheel because they just had to. Kaniko exists and works well. Docker build has downsides. But Red Hat just had to build their own one too.
    - bonzini 2y ago
      It's giving an alternative that you can support to your paying customers, over one where you have found out after 5 years of contributions that you weren't welcome. Yes it was inferior but the alternative was nothing at all. Should I remind you of the Docker people showing up at a conference with "I say no to systemd PRs" t-shirts (https://lwn.net/Articles/676938/ https://lwn.net/Articles/676938/)? Also, Kaniko was made public in January 2018. Buildah had its first release in February 2018. It's unfortunate that both exist but so is life, they were developed concurrently even though Kaniko came first by a few weeks. Given the previous experience with Docker I am not surprised they chose to build something integrated with podman.