22 ms·

Debian committee members vote for systemd as init system

233 points by waffle_ss 13y ago

Spittie 13y ago
Those are the votes for systemd: https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00294.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00294.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00283.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00283.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00297.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00297.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00282.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00282.html For anyone wondering, 4 votes are enough because Bdale's vote (the chairman of the Technical Committee) count as two votes in case of a draw. EDIT: see this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7203479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7203479) comment below - if the other 4 members of the TC vote F, then systemd would not win.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- mjn 13y ago
  Fwiw, the only other vote that's been cast so far, which is in the other direction (3 people haven't yet voted): https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00288.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00288.html
  - kbar13 13y ago
    To be fair he is also the Ubuntu developer and upstart maintainer on the committee
    - dfc 13y ago
      What is there to be or to not "be fair" about? mjn's comment was a value neutral statement of fact. There was nothing prejudicial in his comment.
      - asdfaoeu 13y ago
        He's referring to Steve Langasek not min.
        dfc 13y ago
        What was "unfair"?
  - jevinskie 13y ago
    I agree with that vote. Since Debian is still committed to BSD, they aren't going to drop sysvint once the next-gen init system is in place.
- shornlacuna 13y ago
  It's not quite as simple as that, because if all the remaining committee members vote F (further discussion) ahead of D (systemd) then D gets dropped before the casting vote stage (Debian constitution A.6.3). So far one of the four remaining committee members has done this, another is expected to, leaving the decisions of the remaining two to determine whether the vote completes or not.
  - Spittie 13y ago
    Sorry for spreading misinformation, it seems that I got exited too soon. Still, I find somewhat unlikely that all the others member will vote F ahead of D. Are you referring to the "Technical Committee makes decisions only as last resort." paragraph of the Debian constitution? It's a bit cryptic for a non-native like me, so I'm not sure that I'm reading it right.
    - shornlacuna 13y ago
      No, this is in the voting section A. It reads "Any (non-default) option which does not defeat the default option by its required majority ratio is dropped from consideration." In this case F (further discussion) is the default option, and this stage in the voting process precedes the casting vote. I too think it's unlikely that both Colin and Andi will block the decision, but we've known it's likely that systemd will win for some time now. It's still not yet official. edit: actually there are other possible outcomes, see https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00309.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00309.html
    - dfc 13y ago
      Can you change the title? The current title is so misleading that I feel like flagging it is in order.
      - Spittie 13y ago
        You're asking the wrong guy, I didn't submit this.
      - 13y ago
- sluukkonen 13y ago
  Looks like it's clear now. Colin Watson voted for Upstart[1], so systemd wins. [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00332.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00332.html
  - shornlacuna 13y ago
    Indeed. Note that the reason systemd wins is that Colin voted systemd ahead of further discussion, now defeating it with at least 5 votes from the 8. And then in the subsequent voting stage systemd has at least 4 votes + the chair's casting vote as per the above post.
- norswap 13y ago
  When you see how complex it all is, no wonder people make snide comments about committees.
  - rodgerd 13y ago
    Consider alternatives such as e.g. Mark Shuttleworth unilaterally commanding technology no-one else ends up using.
- jarvic 13y ago
  Everybody, get your popcorn: https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00344.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00344.html
_wmd 13y ago
I wonder how long upstart will survive in Ubuntu after the next Debian stable
- nixgeek 13y ago
  Probably a while, Ubuntu isn't too prone to changing things just because Debian (upstream) decided to do something.
  - shimon_e 13y ago
    Do you think ubuntu will be hiring package maintainers to rewrite all the init scripts so it can continue importing debian packages into universe?
    - viraptor 13y ago
      But they already do. I'm not sure where the big change is.
- mdeslaur 13y ago
  Having Debian switch to systemd by default has no bearing on the preferred init system in Ubuntu.
jordigh 13y ago
For a fun retelling of the events (I think this only works on Firefox): http://aceattorney.sparklin.org/jeu.php?id_proces=57684 http://aceattorney.sparklin.org/jeu.php?id_proces=57684
- lmm 13y ago
  It works perfectly in chrome. I don't know what's with the obnoxious yellow banner - I thought firefox people were against the "best viewed in internet explorer" attitude.
  - bskap 13y ago
    Works fine in IE 11 as well.
  - forgottenpass 13y ago
    I didn't know there was a block of "firefox people", or that everyone developing for firefox was a member and shared the opinions they have. Where's their mailing list/forum?
- Spittie 13y ago
  This is the second part: http://aceattorney.sparklin.org/jeu.php?id_proces=57899 http://aceattorney.sparklin.org/jeu.php?id_proces=57899
  - enko 13y ago
    Unfortunately, the second part seems to get stuck in "cross examination" and it's impossible to continue.
    - TazeTSchnitzel 13y ago
      Does it? It's a Phoenix Wright game. You have to press and present evidence. EDIT: You're right. Pressing each statement yields more dialogue, but without evidence, you can't progress.
    - 13y ago
forgottenpass 13y ago
What happened to the last vote? I saw some criticism that Ian jumped the gun by calling for votes when he did and putting two issues on at once but haven't read the archive in the meantime. Pretty unfortunate it took this long. Even as a casual observer it's looked like they'd eventually pick systemd a month ago. Hopefully this vote is the last one.
- JoshTriplett 13y ago
  > What happened to the last vote? Steve Langasek objected to the wording of the "tight coupling" and "loose coupling" options, and several others on the committee decided to vote Further Discussion first in response to that. It turns out that Steve (upstart maintainer) and Russ (primary systemd advocate on the committee) both agree fairly closely on that issue, in that the committee really shouldn't be ruling on that question in that way.
  - rodgerd 13y ago
    It seems like that's the fundamental split between Ian and Everyone Else. Russ, Bdale, Steve, and Colin all want to make sure that people don't start creating unreasonable dependency chains ("I want the functionality provided by logind for my DE, therefore I will require systemd as the init system") when alternatives are available ("I need the functionality provided by logind so I require that and let systemd or the Canonical fork of logind provide it"). Ian is speccing it out so that nothing may ever rely on capabilities provided by a init implementation unless the Debian developers add that functionality to every possible init system in the archive. That is a very odd position, to put it mildly (you couldn't e.g. ship a GUI tool to manage upstart. You'd have to rewrite it to support systemd, as well).
pekk 13y ago
So when are they going to vote on whether to switch to RPM?
- raikage 13y ago
  When RedHat decides to switch to DEB
  - SEJeff 13y ago
    And why would Reshat want to move to a clearly inferior solution? Next you'll say they want to replace the super simple kickstart with preseed. Blasphemy I say!
    - _ZeD_ 13y ago
      Clearly boh redhat and debian should switch to the even superior slackware txz.
    - FooBarWidget 13y ago
      To be fair, it did take me 15 minutes to write my first RPM. Documentation is pretty good. Writing my first Debian package, on the other hand, took me a day. Documentation is horrible. All tutorials are outdated. All the documents throw tons of jargon at me and just expect that I understand them. The tooling consists of 300 different tools with a lot of overlapping functionality, mostly for historical and backward-compatibility reasons. Debuilder, pbuilder, dpkg-buildpackage, debhelper, cbbs.... what? Learning all this stuf was a nightmare, while RPM was pretty straightforward. Furthermore, Debian packaging tools don't have a preprocessor. It seems they really expect me to repackage my app separately for every distribution version. RPM on the other hand has a builtin preprocessor so that I can customize my specfile on a per-distribution basis with only a single file and a single tool. I ended up writing my own preprocessor for Debian packages, but something tells me I shouldn't have to. On the other hand, RPM does not support "Recommended" and "Suggested" dependencies which are very useful. Neither does it support OR statements in dependency specifications. This latter sucks, a lot.
jiggy2011 13y ago
Not a surprise, was there a compelling reason for upstart at all?
- ash 13y ago
  Upstart was created before systemd. Edit: Upstart was a great sysvinit replacement, at least during those years before systemd appeared.
  - dschulz 13y ago
    That's not compelling.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - vacri 13y ago
      The 'compelling' reason was "sysv has a ton of problems". Upstart was an earlier attempt to resolves those problems - whether it does those well or not doesn't mean that there wasn't a compelling reason to create it.
  - rodgerd 13y ago
    upstart was always a mediocre to terrible sysv replacement. The fact it couldn't handle such insignificant programs like postfix natively speaks volumes.
    - ash 13y ago
      When I wrote "replacement", I didn't mean that all sysv scripts must be replaced. Postfix sysv script works fine with upstart, doesn't it?
      - mercurial 13y ago
        > When I wrote "replacement", I didn't mean that all sysv scripts must be replaced. Postfix sysv script works fine with upstart, doesn't it? I'm honestly not sure if you are making fun of upstart or if you're trying to say that having to keep a sysv compatibility mode around because upstart is not able to handle an extremely common daemon is somehow acceptable.
hayksaakian 13y ago
Could somebody explain like I'm five?
- aoxfordca 13y ago
  I second... Wannabe hacker and don't understand
  - bitskits 13y ago
    This might be a helpful explainer: http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2013/debconf13/high/983_Why_Debian_should_or_should_not_make_systemd_the_default.ogv http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2013/...
  - gpcz 13y ago
    A Linux operating system has a core program called a kernel, which has the job of creating and maintaining an environment where other programs can run. Other programs include the login prompt, the shell that lets you execute programs, etc. However, there is a chicken-and-the-egg problem: once the environment is running, how do you run the first program? This is solved by having the Linux kernel run a program called "init" as the first program, which manages everything else (bringing up services, executing the login prompt, etc). There are multiple versions of this "init" program with different features and idiosyncrasies -- the Debian committee voted to use one called systemd rather than some competitors. Switching versions of init requires system administrators to relearn how to do many things, so the committee spent a lot of time weighing a lot of factors before making this decision.
  - pingswept 13y ago
    A group of programmers who make a popular version of Linux have decided to make their version of Linux start with a new program when the computer boots. Instead of using a program from the 80's called "System V init scripts", they have decided to switch to a new program called "systemd." Both programs have the major responsibility of starting the rest of the programs that make up Linux. I found this explanation of systemd interesting (though more suitable for a wannabe hacker than a 5-year-old (though I suppose the two sets may not be disjoint)): http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html
jtchang 13y ago
Can anyone give a quick rundown of the different init systems? For the most part it can get confusing for a non day to day system administrator when I am trying to get a program to "run on boot". Between rc.local, init.d, run levels, etc. sometimes it is just frustrating.
- XorNot 13y ago
  Upstart is Ubuntu's event driven alternative to init.d. It's big benefit is that it stands alone, and can mimic init.d for compatibility just fine. Personally (perhaps being the system I used) I think it's great - very easy to work with, and I've had no stability problems with it whatsoever.
  - philips 13y ago
    systemd is also sysv and LSB init script compatible.
- CameronNemo 13y ago
  I am just going to go over Upstart and systemd systemd: dependency based init system. A service is written by declaring which services need to be started for that service to start. It is also a syslog like program (journal) and a cgroups writer (cgroups are a cointainment feature of the linux kernel). It also features socket activated and bus activated services, where the init system watches for a socket or dbus bus to be accessed, and then starts the job then. It is criticized for being too invasive and too tied to linux kernel features (like cgroups). Upstart: an event based init system. Jobs start and stop on a certain event (or events). These events can be socket events, dbus events, udev events (network-device-added, removed, changed, etc.) or job events ($JOB-started, stopped, starting, stopping). There are also other events, but those are the basics. It suffers in two areas: socket activation is limited to one tcp or unix socket (no UDP, no tcp6, no DGRAM), and it unreliably stops services. The former is a simple problem that would not be too much work to fix (the developers of Upstart did not want to use socket activation, so they decided to stop efforts on developing it), and the latter is a fundamental code problem. Upstart uses ptrace to track daemons, while systemd uses pidfiles and cgroups. Because Upstart does not use cgroups, it can not kill all of a services children (just that service), and so zombie services might be problematic.
undoware 13y ago
I usually just put everything in inittab. ;D
herokusaki 13y ago
Did Debian at any point consider launchd?
- mateuszf 13y ago
  Doesn't work on Linux.
  - schwarze_pest 13y ago
    Launchd works on Linux (and xBSD) -- in the sense, that it can be ported without much effort. Systemd in contrast only works on Linux because it relies heavily on kernel features like cgroups.
    - CameronNemo 13y ago
      The code is shitty and there is no sysvinit script compatibility.
- schwarze_pest 13y ago
  Ubuntu considered using launchd. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReplacementInit?action=show&redirect=upstart#head-43339edcdef26f39f7d6d0a93bb347e8ccac918d https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReplacementInit?action=show&redirect...
auvrw 13y ago
ran across this link, which might be helpful for people familiar sysvinit but not systemd http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd-for-admins-3.html http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd-for-admins-3.html tl;dc: systemd replaces the bash scripts you're used to grepping through with unix .conf files that fit on the screen.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
dfc 13y ago
Can an HN mod change the title? The committee has not voted in favor of systemd (yet).
kudu 13y ago
I'm very doubtful as to whether it was within the Technical Committee's role to rule on this. After all, there is nearly a consensus on the fact that systemd is the superior init system. The question of whether certain kernels should have more features by default at the expense of portability is a matter of policy, and not a technical decision.
qwoeiu 13y ago
fucking bureaucrats
kashchei 13y ago
I have to remind everyone that the author of systemd is Lennart Poettering, the guy behind Pulseaudio. I think, this is one "feature" that should outweigh all supposed benefits of this program. For those unfamiliar with Pulseaudio development, it's a third-generation audio subsystem (after OSS and ALSA with JACK forming two previous ones, and ESD being the beginning of the third) that is famous for overcomplicated, non-human-writable barely human-readable configuration procedure, development marred with huge number of bugs that ruined audio on Linux until recently, and suffering from immense number of internal interfaces and system being presented as a huge monolithic piece of software that can not be used in a modular manner except as modules that only talk among themselves. systemd seems to suffer from the same problems, plus it tries to "integrate" init, udev and syslog into a single "product", with arcane internal interfaces and formats -- just as non-human-writable as Pulseaudio.
- oblio 13y ago
  I find hard to read such comments and think that they are valuable contributions anymore. First of all, Pulseaudio was not the biggest success, true, but can't someone learn from their mistakes? Both are also living, moving software products that continue to improve, as you said, "development marred with huge number of bugs that ruined audio on Linux until recently" - key words: "until recently". Secondly, about the technical aspects: http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/ http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/ -> "The systemd for Administrators Blog Series" Lennard Poettering said it better than I ever will.
  - kashchei 13y ago
    The design is still beyond horrible, and on par with Windows. If everything that can be shoehorned into a system and "works" despite being a complicated mess, was accepted, we would have adopted Windows registry and SNMP as primary configuration mechanisms, too -- after all, they both work more reliably than Pulseaudio does.
  - kashchei 13y ago
e12e 13y ago
Did anyone see if runit was ever considered? Perhaps it was considered a better alternative to just stick with sysv vs changing to runit?
dschiptsov 13y ago
Now they should start to pray so it will never segfault.)
qwoeiu 13y ago
OpenRC is the only sysvinit alternative that even tries to comply with unix way and yet (judging from Ace Attorney retelling at least) sadly it is totally ignored by Debian devs.
- agumonkey 13y ago
  it was mentioned a few times, missing documentation was probably a deal breaker
miga 13y ago
Since it is vote in a technical discussion, I wouldn't be so sure, until everybody voices their opinion. After all, insight into merits and flaws of each system may change. And that's what technical (sub)committees are for. PS I would vote for "further discussion" in a very Debian style.

233 points by waffle_ss 13y ago

Those are the votes for systemd: https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00294.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00294.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00283.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00283.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00297.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00297.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00282.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00282.html For anyone wondering, 4 votes are enough because Bdale's vote (the chairman of the Technical Committee) count as two votes in case of a draw. EDIT: see this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7203479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7203479) comment below - if the other 4 members of the TC vote F, then systemd would not win.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
mjn 13y ago
Fwiw, the only other vote that's been cast so far, which is in the other direction (3 people haven't yet voted): https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00288.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00288.html
- kbar13 13y ago
  To be fair he is also the Ubuntu developer and upstart maintainer on the committee
  - dfc 13y ago
    What is there to be or to not "be fair" about? mjn's comment was a value neutral statement of fact. There was nothing prejudicial in his comment.
    - asdfaoeu 13y ago
      He's referring to Steve Langasek not min.
      - dfc 13y ago
        What was "unfair"?
- jevinskie 13y ago
  I agree with that vote. Since Debian is still committed to BSD, they aren't going to drop sysvint once the next-gen init system is in place.
shornlacuna 13y ago
It's not quite as simple as that, because if all the remaining committee members vote F (further discussion) ahead of D (systemd) then D gets dropped before the casting vote stage (Debian constitution A.6.3). So far one of the four remaining committee members has done this, another is expected to, leaving the decisions of the remaining two to determine whether the vote completes or not.
- Spittie 13y ago
  Sorry for spreading misinformation, it seems that I got exited too soon. Still, I find somewhat unlikely that all the others member will vote F ahead of D. Are you referring to the "Technical Committee makes decisions only as last resort." paragraph of the Debian constitution? It's a bit cryptic for a non-native like me, so I'm not sure that I'm reading it right.
  - shornlacuna 13y ago
    No, this is in the voting section A. It reads "Any (non-default) option which does not defeat the default option by its required majority ratio is dropped from consideration." In this case F (further discussion) is the default option, and this stage in the voting process precedes the casting vote. I too think it's unlikely that both Colin and Andi will block the decision, but we've known it's likely that systemd will win for some time now. It's still not yet official. edit: actually there are other possible outcomes, see https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00309.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00309.html
  - dfc 13y ago
    Can you change the title? The current title is so misleading that I feel like flagging it is in order.
    - Spittie 13y ago
      You're asking the wrong guy, I didn't submit this.
    - 13y ago
sluukkonen 13y ago
Looks like it's clear now. Colin Watson voted for Upstart[1], so systemd wins. [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00332.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00332.html
- shornlacuna 13y ago
  Indeed. Note that the reason systemd wins is that Colin voted systemd ahead of further discussion, now defeating it with at least 5 votes from the 8. And then in the subsequent voting stage systemd has at least 4 votes + the chair's casting vote as per the above post.
norswap 13y ago
When you see how complex it all is, no wonder people make snide comments about committees.
- rodgerd 13y ago
  Consider alternatives such as e.g. Mark Shuttleworth unilaterally commanding technology no-one else ends up using.
jarvic 13y ago
Everybody, get your popcorn: https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00344.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00344.html

_wmd 13y ago

I wonder how long upstart will survive in Ubuntu after the next Debian stable

nixgeek 13y ago
Probably a while, Ubuntu isn't too prone to changing things just because Debian (upstream) decided to do something.
- shimon_e 13y ago
  Do you think ubuntu will be hiring package maintainers to rewrite all the init scripts so it can continue importing debian packages into universe?
  - viraptor 13y ago
    But they already do. I'm not sure where the big change is.
mdeslaur 13y ago
Having Debian switch to systemd by default has no bearing on the preferred init system in Ubuntu.

jordigh 13y ago

For a fun retelling of the events (I think this only works on Firefox): http://aceattorney.sparklin.org/jeu.php?id_proces=57684 http://aceattorney.sparklin.org/jeu.php?id_proces=57684

lmm 13y ago
It works perfectly in chrome. I don't know what's with the obnoxious yellow banner - I thought firefox people were against the "best viewed in internet explorer" attitude.
- bskap 13y ago
  Works fine in IE 11 as well.
- forgottenpass 13y ago
  I didn't know there was a block of "firefox people", or that everyone developing for firefox was a member and shared the opinions they have. Where's their mailing list/forum?
Spittie 13y ago
This is the second part: http://aceattorney.sparklin.org/jeu.php?id_proces=57899 http://aceattorney.sparklin.org/jeu.php?id_proces=57899
- enko 13y ago
  Unfortunately, the second part seems to get stuck in "cross examination" and it's impossible to continue.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 13y ago
    Does it? It's a Phoenix Wright game. You have to press and present evidence. EDIT: You're right. Pressing each statement yields more dialogue, but without evidence, you can't progress.
  - 13y ago

forgottenpass 13y ago

What happened to the last vote? I saw some criticism that Ian jumped the gun by calling for votes when he did and putting two issues on at once but haven't read the archive in the meantime. Pretty unfortunate it took this long. Even as a casual observer it's looked like they'd eventually pick systemd a month ago. Hopefully this vote is the last one.

JoshTriplett 13y ago
> What happened to the last vote? Steve Langasek objected to the wording of the "tight coupling" and "loose coupling" options, and several others on the committee decided to vote Further Discussion first in response to that. It turns out that Steve (upstart maintainer) and Russ (primary systemd advocate on the committee) both agree fairly closely on that issue, in that the committee really shouldn't be ruling on that question in that way.
- rodgerd 13y ago
  It seems like that's the fundamental split between Ian and Everyone Else. Russ, Bdale, Steve, and Colin all want to make sure that people don't start creating unreasonable dependency chains ("I want the functionality provided by logind for my DE, therefore I will require systemd as the init system") when alternatives are available ("I need the functionality provided by logind so I require that and let systemd or the Canonical fork of logind provide it"). Ian is speccing it out so that nothing may ever rely on capabilities provided by a init implementation unless the Debian developers add that functionality to every possible init system in the archive. That is a very odd position, to put it mildly (you couldn't e.g. ship a GUI tool to manage upstart. You'd have to rewrite it to support systemd, as well).

pekk 13y ago

So when are they going to vote on whether to switch to RPM?

raikage 13y ago
When RedHat decides to switch to DEB
- SEJeff 13y ago
  And why would Reshat want to move to a clearly inferior solution? Next you'll say they want to replace the super simple kickstart with preseed. Blasphemy I say!
  - _ZeD_ 13y ago
    Clearly boh redhat and debian should switch to the even superior slackware txz.
  - FooBarWidget 13y ago
    To be fair, it did take me 15 minutes to write my first RPM. Documentation is pretty good. Writing my first Debian package, on the other hand, took me a day. Documentation is horrible. All tutorials are outdated. All the documents throw tons of jargon at me and just expect that I understand them. The tooling consists of 300 different tools with a lot of overlapping functionality, mostly for historical and backward-compatibility reasons. Debuilder, pbuilder, dpkg-buildpackage, debhelper, cbbs.... what? Learning all this stuf was a nightmare, while RPM was pretty straightforward. Furthermore, Debian packaging tools don't have a preprocessor. It seems they really expect me to repackage my app separately for every distribution version. RPM on the other hand has a builtin preprocessor so that I can customize my specfile on a per-distribution basis with only a single file and a single tool. I ended up writing my own preprocessor for Debian packages, but something tells me I shouldn't have to. On the other hand, RPM does not support "Recommended" and "Suggested" dependencies which are very useful. Neither does it support OR statements in dependency specifications. This latter sucks, a lot.

jiggy2011 13y ago

Not a surprise, was there a compelling reason for upstart at all?

ash 13y ago
Upstart was created before systemd. Edit: Upstart was a great sysvinit replacement, at least during those years before systemd appeared.
- dschulz 13y ago
  That's not compelling.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - vacri 13y ago
    The 'compelling' reason was "sysv has a ton of problems". Upstart was an earlier attempt to resolves those problems - whether it does those well or not doesn't mean that there wasn't a compelling reason to create it.
- rodgerd 13y ago
  upstart was always a mediocre to terrible sysv replacement. The fact it couldn't handle such insignificant programs like postfix natively speaks volumes.
  - ash 13y ago
    When I wrote "replacement", I didn't mean that all sysv scripts must be replaced. Postfix sysv script works fine with upstart, doesn't it?
    - mercurial 13y ago
      > When I wrote "replacement", I didn't mean that all sysv scripts must be replaced. Postfix sysv script works fine with upstart, doesn't it? I'm honestly not sure if you are making fun of upstart or if you're trying to say that having to keep a sysv compatibility mode around because upstart is not able to handle an extremely common daemon is somehow acceptable.

hayksaakian 13y ago

Could somebody explain like I'm five?

aoxfordca 13y ago
I second... Wannabe hacker and don't understand
- bitskits 13y ago
  This might be a helpful explainer: http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2013/debconf13/high/983_Why_Debian_should_or_should_not_make_systemd_the_default.ogv http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2013/...
- gpcz 13y ago
  A Linux operating system has a core program called a kernel, which has the job of creating and maintaining an environment where other programs can run. Other programs include the login prompt, the shell that lets you execute programs, etc. However, there is a chicken-and-the-egg problem: once the environment is running, how do you run the first program? This is solved by having the Linux kernel run a program called "init" as the first program, which manages everything else (bringing up services, executing the login prompt, etc). There are multiple versions of this "init" program with different features and idiosyncrasies -- the Debian committee voted to use one called systemd rather than some competitors. Switching versions of init requires system administrators to relearn how to do many things, so the committee spent a lot of time weighing a lot of factors before making this decision.
- pingswept 13y ago
  A group of programmers who make a popular version of Linux have decided to make their version of Linux start with a new program when the computer boots. Instead of using a program from the 80's called "System V init scripts", they have decided to switch to a new program called "systemd." Both programs have the major responsibility of starting the rest of the programs that make up Linux. I found this explanation of systemd interesting (though more suitable for a wannabe hacker than a 5-year-old (though I suppose the two sets may not be disjoint)): http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html

jtchang 13y ago

Can anyone give a quick rundown of the different init systems? For the most part it can get confusing for a non day to day system administrator when I am trying to get a program to "run on boot". Between rc.local, init.d, run levels, etc. sometimes it is just frustrating.

XorNot 13y ago
Upstart is Ubuntu's event driven alternative to init.d. It's big benefit is that it stands alone, and can mimic init.d for compatibility just fine. Personally (perhaps being the system I used) I think it's great - very easy to work with, and I've had no stability problems with it whatsoever.
- philips 13y ago
  systemd is also sysv and LSB init script compatible.
CameronNemo 13y ago
I am just going to go over Upstart and systemd systemd: dependency based init system. A service is written by declaring which services need to be started for that service to start. It is also a syslog like program (journal) and a cgroups writer (cgroups are a cointainment feature of the linux kernel). It also features socket activated and bus activated services, where the init system watches for a socket or dbus bus to be accessed, and then starts the job then. It is criticized for being too invasive and too tied to linux kernel features (like cgroups). Upstart: an event based init system. Jobs start and stop on a certain event (or events). These events can be socket events, dbus events, udev events (network-device-added, removed, changed, etc.) or job events ($JOB-started, stopped, starting, stopping). There are also other events, but those are the basics. It suffers in two areas: socket activation is limited to one tcp or unix socket (no UDP, no tcp6, no DGRAM), and it unreliably stops services. The former is a simple problem that would not be too much work to fix (the developers of Upstart did not want to use socket activation, so they decided to stop efforts on developing it), and the latter is a fundamental code problem. Upstart uses ptrace to track daemons, while systemd uses pidfiles and cgroups. Because Upstart does not use cgroups, it can not kill all of a services children (just that service), and so zombie services might be problematic.

undoware 13y ago

I usually just put everything in inittab. ;D

herokusaki 13y ago

Did Debian at any point consider launchd?

mateuszf 13y ago
Doesn't work on Linux.
- schwarze_pest 13y ago
  Launchd works on Linux (and xBSD) -- in the sense, that it can be ported without much effort. Systemd in contrast only works on Linux because it relies heavily on kernel features like cgroups.
  - CameronNemo 13y ago
    The code is shitty and there is no sysvinit script compatibility.
schwarze_pest 13y ago
Ubuntu considered using launchd. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReplacementInit?action=show&redirect=upstart#head-43339edcdef26f39f7d6d0a93bb347e8ccac918d https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReplacementInit?action=show&redirect...

auvrw 13y ago

ran across this link, which might be helpful for people familiar sysvinit but not systemd http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd-for-admins-3.html http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd-for-admins-3.html tl;dc: systemd replaces the bash scripts you're used to grepping through with unix .conf files that fit on the screen.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

dfc 13y ago

Can an HN mod change the title? The committee has not voted in favor of systemd (yet).

kudu 13y ago

I'm very doubtful as to whether it was within the Technical Committee's role to rule on this. After all, there is nearly a consensus on the fact that systemd is the superior init system. The question of whether certain kernels should have more features by default at the expense of portability is a matter of policy, and not a technical decision.

qwoeiu 13y ago

fucking bureaucrats

kashchei 13y ago

I have to remind everyone that the author of systemd is Lennart Poettering, the guy behind Pulseaudio. I think, this is one "feature" that should outweigh all supposed benefits of this program. For those unfamiliar with Pulseaudio development, it's a third-generation audio subsystem (after OSS and ALSA with JACK forming two previous ones, and ESD being the beginning of the third) that is famous for overcomplicated, non-human-writable barely human-readable configuration procedure, development marred with huge number of bugs that ruined audio on Linux until recently, and suffering from immense number of internal interfaces and system being presented as a huge monolithic piece of software that can not be used in a modular manner except as modules that only talk among themselves. systemd seems to suffer from the same problems, plus it tries to "integrate" init, udev and syslog into a single "product", with arcane internal interfaces and formats -- just as non-human-writable as Pulseaudio.

oblio 13y ago
I find hard to read such comments and think that they are valuable contributions anymore. First of all, Pulseaudio was not the biggest success, true, but can't someone learn from their mistakes? Both are also living, moving software products that continue to improve, as you said, "development marred with huge number of bugs that ruined audio on Linux until recently" - key words: "until recently". Secondly, about the technical aspects: http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/ http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/ -> "The systemd for Administrators Blog Series" Lennard Poettering said it better than I ever will.
- kashchei 13y ago
  The design is still beyond horrible, and on par with Windows. If everything that can be shoehorned into a system and "works" despite being a complicated mess, was accepted, we would have adopted Windows registry and SNMP as primary configuration mechanisms, too -- after all, they both work more reliably than Pulseaudio does.
- kashchei 13y ago

e12e 13y ago

Did anyone see if runit was ever considered? Perhaps it was considered a better alternative to just stick with sysv vs changing to runit?

dschiptsov 13y ago

Now they should start to pray so it will never segfault.)

qwoeiu 13y ago

OpenRC is the only sysvinit alternative that even tries to comply with unix way and yet (judging from Ace Attorney retelling at least) sadly it is totally ignored by Debian devs.

agumonkey 13y ago
it was mentioned a few times, missing documentation was probably a deal breaker

miga 13y ago

Since it is vote in a technical discussion, I wouldn't be so sure, until everybody voices their opinion. After all, insight into merits and flaws of each system may change. And that's what technical (sub)committees are for. PS I would vote for "further discussion" in a very Debian style.