34 ms·

Losing graciously

513 points by ash 13y ago

chimeracoder 13y ago
> I will ask members of the Ubuntu community to help to implement this decision efficiently, bringing systemd into both Debian and Ubuntu safely and expeditiously. Well, this was a pleasant surprise. I honestly thought that Ubuntu would continue to use Upstart regardless of what Debian decided. It'd have been a monumental amount of work to take on, but on the other hand, there's already been a lot of NIH-syndrome in Ubuntu-land for a while (Upstart, Mir, Unity, etc.) Ubuntu's been slowly moving in the direction of becoming a "silo", spearate from other Linux distributions for a while now (a direction I dislike). If Ubuntu had decided to double-down on Upstart against the tide, that would have been the final nail in the coffin for them (in my books - they'd still find success for at least a while no matter what they did). EDIT: Upstart may actually not be a great example of NIH, but Mir certainly is.
- maxerickson 13y ago
  One difference is that the init system is not especially user facing. (It can be, but that means it isn't working very well)
  - Eiwatah4 13y ago
    It is for sysadmins. And those are probably Canonical's biggest source of income.
    - d0 13y ago
      Not really. We're mainly concerned that the interface is consistent. service ssh restart works fine but that was fine in sysvinit as well..
      - octo_t 13y ago
        for some value of fine. service my_service restart required writing 100+ shell scripts, each of which was error prone and difficult.
        d0 13y ago
        But also 100% not my problem :)
        pjscott 13y ago
        If one of those scripts forgets to kill a process's children (because the process itself was supposed to handle that), and a server ends up with a bazillion orphaned processes, then it could well become your problem! This happened to me once. Never again, damn it.
        jude- 13y ago
        What stopped you from spawning the daemon in a cgroup?
        pjscott 13y ago
        I didn't know about them at the time, and I wasn't the one who wrote the script that spawned it.
  - babarock 13y ago
    It matters to sysadmins and programmers.
- skywhopper 13y ago
  I'm assuming the reality that systemd's API will eventually wheedle its way into most other Debian components made the decision for him. Swapping out Gnome for Unity is a lot easier for someone downstream of Debian than continuing to maintain Upstart in the face of Systemd will be.
- rlpb 13y ago
  > but on the other hand, there's already been a lot of NIH-syndrome in Ubuntu-land for a while (Upstart... Upstart is certainly not an example of NIH-syndrome. At the time that upstart was written, nothing else existed that solved the problems that it did. systemd did not exist at the time. Ubuntu led the way here, and it is unfair to claim otherwise.
  - gsnedders 13y ago
    launchd existed — albeit was decided against in large part down to licensing concerns (it was, at the time, only available under the Apple Public Source License 2.0 (APSL)), though a couple of months later it was re-licensed under the Apache License 2.0 to alleviate such concerns. OpenSolaris's SMF was considered too. AIUI both were purely decided against on licensing grounds, although they met the technical requirements. Had launchd already been available under the Apache License 2.0 at the time, who knows, it might now be well-established on Linux. (AIUI, GPL compatibility is not an issue here — the problem is more the APSL isn't compatible with, e.g., the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) and hence would never be adopted by the Linux community at large.)
- lwf 13y ago
  unity also predates gnome-shell, I might add.
  - bkor 13y ago
    It does not predate gnome-shell. They were first to call it stable, while GNOME shell was way more stable when we called it stable. You should check the first commits, not when something is released as 1.0. The latter is up to the maintainer and you can do that at any time (and in some cases: never).
    - mdeslaur 13y ago
      Well, the first UNR launcher commit is from 2008-04-16, the first gnome-shell commit is from 2008-10-31. It's pretty close.
- Ologn 13y ago
  I agree with what you said about Ubuntu NIH syndrome. If their alternatives were better, or at least equivalent, it would not be so bad. But these NIH projects typically only have Canonical (and some Ubuntu) people working on them. Go to Launchpad bugs and look through open and closed tickets. The NIH projects often cause Ubuntu user problems, and they just lay there and no one fixes them. If Debian, Red Hat, fd.o etc. had other distros depending on things, there would be a lot of people around to fix problems. When Ubuntu does it's own version, they are usually the people who have to fix problems.
ZenoArrow 13y ago
Losing graciously is always deserving of respect. Thank you Mark.
awjr 13y ago
Kudos to him for this. Could not have been an easy decision but does sound like he listens and wants what is best for Ubuntu in the long run.
buster 13y ago
Wow, i wouldn't have thought that. Since i moved away from Ubuntu to Debian mostly because all this upstart, mir, advertising solo attempts, it's nice to hear that. Now i'm waiting for the same blog post about supporting Wayland and i may even switch back sometimes.
- pekk 13y ago
  Who is using Wayland right now?
  - kuschku 13y ago
    Who is using Mir right now? Not even Ubuntu. They use Mir only as a wrapper around XMir which then displays Unity – they've won nothing with this. But with Wayland coming to kubuntu this summer and Mir coming to Ubuntu at the same time, we'll see how Wayland and Mir compare in production.
    - jcastro 13y ago
      Mir has been shipping on Ubuntu Touch since 13.10.
      - sixbrx 13y ago
        Well that begs for another question, I would say...
    - hercynium 13y ago
      Indeed, I think we're about to see some very interesting times in the next year or so, with regard to GUI/Windowing systems in the Linux world. Wayland has been a long time coming, and I do hope that's because those working on it are really shooting to get things right. Mir is interesting, and it looks like it will be able to do some things that Wayland/Weston can't, or would require some difficult hacks or even spec changes to make work. I don't know if Mir would be better than Wayland for me, but if you ignore all the FUD from both sides, I think the bottom line is that Mir is better for Canonical's plans unless or until Wayland/Weston can be changed to accommodate their needs. I personally have no positive or negative opinion on Mir vs. Wayland, but I hope that at least one truly delivers on their potential and shows a clear improvement over our old trusty ;) X11/Xorg.
jericevans 13y ago
Graciously?
- Flimm 13y ago
  What's not gracious about that post? Losing graciously doesn't mean giving up without a fight, it means once you've lost, you take it well.
  - ronaldx 13y ago
    I actually found it somewhat less than gracious. I read it to say that the wrong decision has been made, but accepted - an attempt to gain political points for the next round. If you have to say you're being gracious, you're probably not.
    - sspiff 13y ago
      It's clear that he thought Upstart was a better choice. His opinion hasn't changed, but he accepts that the majority of people who voted on this thought differently, and accept their decision. If you're convinced something is good/better, and you've argued that way for months, do you change your mind about all that when a committee or manager decides to go the other direction anyway?
    - doe88 13y ago
      > I read it to say that the wrong decision has been made, but accepted Sorry I don't read it your way, he seems to recognize that both systems would make an excellent choice: "From my perspective the fact that good people were clearly split suggests that either option would work perfectly well."
    - dspillett 13y ago
      Being gracious in this sort of instance doesn't necessitate admitting you were wrong.
      - ronaldx 13y ago
mpnordland 13y ago
Now that's a surprise. I've never known Canonical to give up like that.
- d0 13y ago
  There's still time for Shuttleworth to get pissy yet.
  - DougMerritt 13y ago
    In his own title, he called himself gracious, which struck me as what people do when the graciousness comes very hard to them and they have to make a strong conscious effort. So possibly he felt pissy about, but rose above that. I think he'd get extra graciousness points if he hadn't called himself gracious, though.
    - mekoka 13y ago
      My thought as well. It's reminiscent of people listing humility as one of their qualities.
themartorana 13y ago
It's a tad annoying for us kinda-sys-admins that run full stacks in AWS (or other cloud services) and have to maintain not only domain knowledge for the code we're writing to run on the stack, but the server architecture and services of the OS we choose. My time is limited, and Upstart scripts have been written and run wonderfully. Ubuntu smooths out many things, which is why I (and I guess many others) choose it for my main server OS. I'm glad to hear 14.04 LTS will still have Upstart support, but this means I have to put "move to systemd" as a medium-range ticket, which is sadly more time wasted. Go progress! But comon, progress! Stop making more work for me. :)
- chimeracoder 13y ago
  On the other hand, you'd be feeling quite differently if your AWS stacks currently consisted of RedHat or CentOS (as they oftentimes do for larger/enterprise environments). I agree, you drew the short stick on this particular transition, but overall, this is a win for sysadmins in the long run, as it seems like all the major distros[0] are moving towards systemd. Systemd isn't that much more to get used to if you already know sysvinit, and this way your scripts will be more portable to other distros, not less. [0] IMHO, Gentoo isn't a distro so much as a meta-distro - "create your own distribution".
  - reidrac 13y ago
    Not sure about the first part of your comment as neither RHEL nor CentOS use systemd right now (in fact RHEL 6/CentOS 6 uses upstart). RHEL 7 will be systemd based, but it isn't ready (yet), and in my experience people tend to stay in the major release they're in instead of upgrading. So it will be a long time before systemd is really widespread between RHEL/CentOS users.
    - keypusher 13y ago
      RHEL6 was released in 2010. That's why they are "still" using Upstart, because systemd didn't exist when RHEL6 was being qualified. Fedora (which is upstream/testing for RHEL/CentOS) switched to systemd years ago. 3 releases ago at least. RHEL is the equivalent of what Fedora was a few years ago, plus testing and bugfixing by people that get paid from the billions in support contract money that Red Hat pulls in every year. RHEL7 betas and rcs have been available to server admins under contract for a while, they are likely figuring out upgrade issues currently, and when it comes out they probably will switch over a lot of their machines. All those people have support contracts with Red Hat, the packages are qualified and if something goes wrong they get to call up and complain. If you are coming from the Ubuntu world RHEL is Long Term Stable, and upgrading to a new LTS might be work for your admins but the OS should be solid already.
saosebastiao 13y ago
So when will we see them drop Mir?
- tinco 13y ago
  When all other distros start using Wayland, so never. Mir hasnt lost the race, it just entered late. You could critisize them for entering late, but in the end it doesn't matter. As long as people are working on viable X alternatives.
cs702 13y ago
Some individuals in the Linux community regularly criticize Canonical for "not playing along well with others" and taking Ubuntu in directions that go against "the community's wishes." I think those individuals are misguided. Canonical does try to collaborate with other projects and distributions. It's just that such collaboration is not the company's priority. Canonical's priority, as best as I can judge, is to make Ubuntu the world's leading Linux distribution for desktops and other platforms -- cloud, tablet, phone, etc. So they will use whatever F/LOSS code works best to achieve this goal, regardless of whether it's internally or externally developed. They are not letting 'ego' and 'pride' get in the way of achieving their goal. If using systemd will help them achieve their goal more than using upstart, they will use systemd. Ditto for Unity versus Gnome, and for Mir versus Wayland. For them, it's not about "winning the argument," but about "winning the #1 spot."
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- simonebrunozzi 13y ago
  Unity and Mir have been two good choices.
  - yxhuvud 13y ago
    Mir isn't really rolled out enough to settle the score on that one. Totally agreed on Unity though - it is a breath of fresh air compared to most alternatives on linux.
    - rpdillon 13y ago
      Unity was rolled out too early, and in a hardly stable state. It sacrifices desktop usability for consistency across devices: desktop, tablet and phone. I disagree that desktop computing design should be constrained by the limitations of touch-based devices. So, rather than a breath of fresh air, I see it as a disruptive change in UX, intended to win in the long term, but at the expense of short-term usability. Ditto for the move to Mir. But I don't resent Canonical for this -- I use Linux because I can choose the experience (KDE 4 at the moment). I just hope the short-term sacrifices in terms of usability and fragmentation don't harm adoption too much.
ForHackernews 13y ago
It's interesting he doesn't mention that at least one significant factor against Upstart (from the perspective of Debian) was the Canonical Contributor License Agreement. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUOAUQJ-y00&t=42m15s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUOAUQJ-y00&t=42m15s
- dfc 13y ago
  That was interesting? You expected him to shine a light on their "icky problem"? Every community has their "icky problem" that they do not like to talk about in mixed company, if at all. The CCLA is Canonical's icky problem.
timothy0530 13y ago
Good read. Solid points
TeMPOraL 13y ago
> From my perspective the fact that good people were clearly split suggests that either option would work perfectly well. It's a nice rationality gem right here. If the costs and benefits of both options you're choosing from balance each other out, instead of carefully searching for optimal solution that will yield little marginal utility benefit you may as well toss a coin and be done with it.
- yeahbutbut 13y ago
  Definitely a management perspective.
  - hercynium 13y ago
    Sometimes that's the best perspective to have. And in this case, I believe it is. If left up to us engineers/hackers/nerds, we would continue to stubbornly work on or with one system or the other, prolonging the debate indefinitely. And hey, if enough people really feel strongly that Upstart is superior, it's FOSS! Fork and build a community! I know it's not easy but if enough people share your passion it can happen, and that's Yet Another Reason(tm) Open Source rocks.
  - mwfunk 13y ago
    No, it's an intelligent perspective. I would hope that any engineer would follow similar reasoning and arrive at similar conclusions given the facts.
- gwern 13y ago
  http://lesswrong.com/lw/th/harder_choices_matter_less/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/th/harder_choices_matter_less/ There's also Piet Hein's classic decision-making strategy when both strategies seem equally good: flip a coin and do what it says. And if you suddenly feel in your gut that the coin picked the wrong option, then you've discovered they weren't equally good.
  - TeMPOraL 13y ago
    Actually it's where I first read that insight ;). Though I'm never able to find the link when I need it.
nly 13y ago
s/upstart/Mir/g s/systemd/Wayland/g s/2014/2015/g
- arnehormann 13y ago
  Your regexps are wrong, these replacements don't make any sense at all.
  - SwellJoe 13y ago
    Unless there was an edit, they do actually make sense, if you think of this post as being rewritten in a year to discuss a move away from Mir (current Ubuntu graphics thing) to Wayland (current non-Ubuntu graphics thing that most everybody else is probably moving to).
    - arnehormann 13y ago
      Right now they say replace all occurrences of "upstart" with "Mir" and all occurrences of "systemd" with "Wayland". I can't see how that would work.
      - wmf 13y ago
        "Ubuntu is switching from upstart to systemd in 2014" -> "Ubuntu is switching from Mir to Wayland in 2015"
- ZenoArrow 13y ago
  Why would they drop Mir? Dropping Upstart makes sense because systemd has momentum and they both do basically the same job. With Mir vs. Wayland they already evaluated Wayland and decided it wasn't going to be suitable for their needs, unless Canonical change their target markets this isn't something that'd make sense to change (unless a later version of Wayland supports what they want).
  - snotrockets 13y ago
angersock 13y ago
"(today our focus is on the cloud and on mobile, and we are quite clearly leading GNU/Linux on both fronts) " How is targeting two widely-different platforms focus? And how exactly is Ubuntu leading Linux in the cloud?
- mistercow 13y ago
  Pretty much every source I can find shows Ubuntu with a clear lead, if not an actual majority in marketshare on EC2 instances.
curtis17 13y ago
Canonical are making a bet on the graphical subsystem re Mir/QT/QML/Oneclick to crack touch/mobile. Similar to Apple going all-in on Objective C/Cocoa(Touch). But for the low level non-graphical parts of Ubuntu it makes a lot of sense to stick to standard Linux/Debian. At the terminal/sysadmin/command line level a standard setup is desirable.
dhfjgkrgjg 13y ago
Upstart although being first was never going to win against the marketing forces behind systemd. In the old days, tech was evaluated on technical merit, today the slickest marketing hucksters win. Yet another piece of lennart-ware to bring down the linux experience. Thank you BSDs for providing a sane alternative.
azinman2 13y ago
The headline made me think he was going to talk about losing the desktop and mobile wars!
vidoc 13y ago
Nice move indeed! Let's just hope that there will always be viable alternatives, just in case the systemd project ends up like pulseaudio.
- vially 13y ago
  How did pulseaudio ended up? It seems to me that it's quite a healthy project right now. It may have had some issues at the beginning but I can't find anything to complain about it right now.
ruben_varnish 13y ago
I am an Ubuntu member and I was deeply wondering what I was going to do next... Tollef had me realizing systemd is the future for quite a while now :-) Mark reminds us once again what the mission of Ubuntu is, why it is the best alternative for end-user computing in the FLOSS world and, for me personally, that I have a home already and do not need to go anywhere. And... onward to build on top of the great foundation we already have.
kungpooey 13y ago
Canonical, and more personally, Mark have been targets of my frustration with the Linux desktop, I moved like many others to Mint. This is a very welcome reminder that even if phrased negatively as 'lessor evils', Canonical contributes and attracts people from various backgrounds to something I sincerely want to overtake the current selection of OS options (more philosophically than anything). Canonical may not listen very well, and ultimately that may hurt any chances of desktop success for linux, however this reminds me they're still in a very small circle of 'lessor' evils.
LukeHoersten 13y ago
I'm really sad about this. I love Upstart and think it's an elegant init process implementation. Anyone more informed than myself care to summarize the key points in making the decision?
- kazagistar 13y ago
  The summary is essentially just that systemd is just a bit more elegant. Basically the (non gamed) votes had those two at the top, but in the end upstart had a few more pain points, and systemd had a few more features. - SystemD parallelization is more automatic. - SystemD has built in logging for all managed processes. - SystemD has Socket Activation (start process on demand) - SystemD has more momentum in other major distros (Fedora, Arch) - etc..
greatsuccess 13y ago
The "new stewards of PID 1" == welcome to your imminent doom.
mverwijs 13y ago
The flipside is that diversity in software is usually mentioned as a Good Thing. Losing Upstart means losing diversity, no?

513 points by ash 13y ago

> I will ask members of the Ubuntu community to help to implement this decision efficiently, bringing systemd into both Debian and Ubuntu safely and expeditiously. Well, this was a pleasant surprise. I honestly thought that Ubuntu would continue to use Upstart regardless of what Debian decided. It'd have been a monumental amount of work to take on, but on the other hand, there's already been a lot of NIH-syndrome in Ubuntu-land for a while (Upstart, Mir, Unity, etc.) Ubuntu's been slowly moving in the direction of becoming a "silo", spearate from other Linux distributions for a while now (a direction I dislike). If Ubuntu had decided to double-down on Upstart against the tide, that would have been the final nail in the coffin for them (in my books - they'd still find success for at least a while no matter what they did). EDIT: Upstart may actually not be a great example of NIH, but Mir certainly is.

maxerickson 13y ago
One difference is that the init system is not especially user facing. (It can be, but that means it isn't working very well)
- Eiwatah4 13y ago
  It is for sysadmins. And those are probably Canonical's biggest source of income.
  - d0 13y ago
    Not really. We're mainly concerned that the interface is consistent. service ssh restart works fine but that was fine in sysvinit as well..
    - octo_t 13y ago
      for some value of fine. service my_service restart required writing 100+ shell scripts, each of which was error prone and difficult.
      - d0 13y ago
        But also 100% not my problem :)
        pjscott 13y ago
        If one of those scripts forgets to kill a process's children (because the process itself was supposed to handle that), and a server ends up with a bazillion orphaned processes, then it could well become your problem! This happened to me once. Never again, damn it.
        jude- 13y ago
        What stopped you from spawning the daemon in a cgroup?
        pjscott 13y ago
        I didn't know about them at the time, and I wasn't the one who wrote the script that spawned it.
- babarock 13y ago
  It matters to sysadmins and programmers.
skywhopper 13y ago
I'm assuming the reality that systemd's API will eventually wheedle its way into most other Debian components made the decision for him. Swapping out Gnome for Unity is a lot easier for someone downstream of Debian than continuing to maintain Upstart in the face of Systemd will be.
rlpb 13y ago
> but on the other hand, there's already been a lot of NIH-syndrome in Ubuntu-land for a while (Upstart... Upstart is certainly not an example of NIH-syndrome. At the time that upstart was written, nothing else existed that solved the problems that it did. systemd did not exist at the time. Ubuntu led the way here, and it is unfair to claim otherwise.
- gsnedders 13y ago
  launchd existed — albeit was decided against in large part down to licensing concerns (it was, at the time, only available under the Apple Public Source License 2.0 (APSL)), though a couple of months later it was re-licensed under the Apache License 2.0 to alleviate such concerns. OpenSolaris's SMF was considered too. AIUI both were purely decided against on licensing grounds, although they met the technical requirements. Had launchd already been available under the Apache License 2.0 at the time, who knows, it might now be well-established on Linux. (AIUI, GPL compatibility is not an issue here — the problem is more the APSL isn't compatible with, e.g., the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) and hence would never be adopted by the Linux community at large.)
lwf 13y ago
unity also predates gnome-shell, I might add.
- bkor 13y ago
  It does not predate gnome-shell. They were first to call it stable, while GNOME shell was way more stable when we called it stable. You should check the first commits, not when something is released as 1.0. The latter is up to the maintainer and you can do that at any time (and in some cases: never).
  - mdeslaur 13y ago
    Well, the first UNR launcher commit is from 2008-04-16, the first gnome-shell commit is from 2008-10-31. It's pretty close.
Ologn 13y ago
I agree with what you said about Ubuntu NIH syndrome. If their alternatives were better, or at least equivalent, it would not be so bad. But these NIH projects typically only have Canonical (and some Ubuntu) people working on them. Go to Launchpad bugs and look through open and closed tickets. The NIH projects often cause Ubuntu user problems, and they just lay there and no one fixes them. If Debian, Red Hat, fd.o etc. had other distros depending on things, there would be a lot of people around to fix problems. When Ubuntu does it's own version, they are usually the people who have to fix problems.

ZenoArrow 13y ago

Losing graciously is always deserving of respect. Thank you Mark.

awjr 13y ago

Kudos to him for this. Could not have been an easy decision but does sound like he listens and wants what is best for Ubuntu in the long run.

buster 13y ago

Wow, i wouldn't have thought that. Since i moved away from Ubuntu to Debian mostly because all this upstart, mir, advertising solo attempts, it's nice to hear that. Now i'm waiting for the same blog post about supporting Wayland and i may even switch back sometimes.

pekk 13y ago
Who is using Wayland right now?
- kuschku 13y ago
  Who is using Mir right now? Not even Ubuntu. They use Mir only as a wrapper around XMir which then displays Unity – they've won nothing with this. But with Wayland coming to kubuntu this summer and Mir coming to Ubuntu at the same time, we'll see how Wayland and Mir compare in production.
  - jcastro 13y ago
    Mir has been shipping on Ubuntu Touch since 13.10.
    - sixbrx 13y ago
      Well that begs for another question, I would say...
  - hercynium 13y ago
    Indeed, I think we're about to see some very interesting times in the next year or so, with regard to GUI/Windowing systems in the Linux world. Wayland has been a long time coming, and I do hope that's because those working on it are really shooting to get things right. Mir is interesting, and it looks like it will be able to do some things that Wayland/Weston can't, or would require some difficult hacks or even spec changes to make work. I don't know if Mir would be better than Wayland for me, but if you ignore all the FUD from both sides, I think the bottom line is that Mir is better for Canonical's plans unless or until Wayland/Weston can be changed to accommodate their needs. I personally have no positive or negative opinion on Mir vs. Wayland, but I hope that at least one truly delivers on their potential and shows a clear improvement over our old trusty ;) X11/Xorg.

jericevans 13y ago

Graciously?

Flimm 13y ago
What's not gracious about that post? Losing graciously doesn't mean giving up without a fight, it means once you've lost, you take it well.
- ronaldx 13y ago
  I actually found it somewhat less than gracious. I read it to say that the wrong decision has been made, but accepted - an attempt to gain political points for the next round. If you have to say you're being gracious, you're probably not.
  - sspiff 13y ago
    It's clear that he thought Upstart was a better choice. His opinion hasn't changed, but he accepts that the majority of people who voted on this thought differently, and accept their decision. If you're convinced something is good/better, and you've argued that way for months, do you change your mind about all that when a committee or manager decides to go the other direction anyway?
  - doe88 13y ago
    > I read it to say that the wrong decision has been made, but accepted Sorry I don't read it your way, he seems to recognize that both systems would make an excellent choice: "From my perspective the fact that good people were clearly split suggests that either option would work perfectly well."
  - dspillett 13y ago
    Being gracious in this sort of instance doesn't necessitate admitting you were wrong.
    - ronaldx 13y ago

mpnordland 13y ago

Now that's a surprise. I've never known Canonical to give up like that.

d0 13y ago
There's still time for Shuttleworth to get pissy yet.
- DougMerritt 13y ago
  In his own title, he called himself gracious, which struck me as what people do when the graciousness comes very hard to them and they have to make a strong conscious effort. So possibly he felt pissy about, but rose above that. I think he'd get extra graciousness points if he hadn't called himself gracious, though.
  - mekoka 13y ago
    My thought as well. It's reminiscent of people listing humility as one of their qualities.

themartorana 13y ago

It's a tad annoying for us kinda-sys-admins that run full stacks in AWS (or other cloud services) and have to maintain not only domain knowledge for the code we're writing to run on the stack, but the server architecture and services of the OS we choose. My time is limited, and Upstart scripts have been written and run wonderfully. Ubuntu smooths out many things, which is why I (and I guess many others) choose it for my main server OS. I'm glad to hear 14.04 LTS will still have Upstart support, but this means I have to put "move to systemd" as a medium-range ticket, which is sadly more time wasted. Go progress! But comon, progress! Stop making more work for me. :)

chimeracoder 13y ago
On the other hand, you'd be feeling quite differently if your AWS stacks currently consisted of RedHat or CentOS (as they oftentimes do for larger/enterprise environments). I agree, you drew the short stick on this particular transition, but overall, this is a win for sysadmins in the long run, as it seems like all the major distros[0] are moving towards systemd. Systemd isn't that much more to get used to if you already know sysvinit, and this way your scripts will be more portable to other distros, not less. [0] IMHO, Gentoo isn't a distro so much as a meta-distro - "create your own distribution".
- reidrac 13y ago
  Not sure about the first part of your comment as neither RHEL nor CentOS use systemd right now (in fact RHEL 6/CentOS 6 uses upstart). RHEL 7 will be systemd based, but it isn't ready (yet), and in my experience people tend to stay in the major release they're in instead of upgrading. So it will be a long time before systemd is really widespread between RHEL/CentOS users.
  - keypusher 13y ago
    RHEL6 was released in 2010. That's why they are "still" using Upstart, because systemd didn't exist when RHEL6 was being qualified. Fedora (which is upstream/testing for RHEL/CentOS) switched to systemd years ago. 3 releases ago at least. RHEL is the equivalent of what Fedora was a few years ago, plus testing and bugfixing by people that get paid from the billions in support contract money that Red Hat pulls in every year. RHEL7 betas and rcs have been available to server admins under contract for a while, they are likely figuring out upgrade issues currently, and when it comes out they probably will switch over a lot of their machines. All those people have support contracts with Red Hat, the packages are qualified and if something goes wrong they get to call up and complain. If you are coming from the Ubuntu world RHEL is Long Term Stable, and upgrading to a new LTS might be work for your admins but the OS should be solid already.

saosebastiao 13y ago

So when will we see them drop Mir?

tinco 13y ago
When all other distros start using Wayland, so never. Mir hasnt lost the race, it just entered late. You could critisize them for entering late, but in the end it doesn't matter. As long as people are working on viable X alternatives.

cs702 13y ago

Some individuals in the Linux community regularly criticize Canonical for "not playing along well with others" and taking Ubuntu in directions that go against "the community's wishes." I think those individuals are misguided. Canonical does try to collaborate with other projects and distributions. It's just that such collaboration is not the company's priority. Canonical's priority, as best as I can judge, is to make Ubuntu the world's leading Linux distribution for desktops and other platforms -- cloud, tablet, phone, etc. So they will use whatever F/LOSS code works best to achieve this goal, regardless of whether it's internally or externally developed. They are not letting 'ego' and 'pride' get in the way of achieving their goal. If using systemd will help them achieve their goal more than using upstart, they will use systemd. Ditto for Unity versus Gnome, and for Mir versus Wayland. For them, it's not about "winning the argument," but about "winning the #1 spot."

deleted 13y ago
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simonebrunozzi 13y ago
Unity and Mir have been two good choices.
- yxhuvud 13y ago
  Mir isn't really rolled out enough to settle the score on that one. Totally agreed on Unity though - it is a breath of fresh air compared to most alternatives on linux.
  - rpdillon 13y ago
    Unity was rolled out too early, and in a hardly stable state. It sacrifices desktop usability for consistency across devices: desktop, tablet and phone. I disagree that desktop computing design should be constrained by the limitations of touch-based devices. So, rather than a breath of fresh air, I see it as a disruptive change in UX, intended to win in the long term, but at the expense of short-term usability. Ditto for the move to Mir. But I don't resent Canonical for this -- I use Linux because I can choose the experience (KDE 4 at the moment). I just hope the short-term sacrifices in terms of usability and fragmentation don't harm adoption too much.

ForHackernews 13y ago

It's interesting he doesn't mention that at least one significant factor against Upstart (from the perspective of Debian) was the Canonical Contributor License Agreement. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUOAUQJ-y00&t=42m15s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUOAUQJ-y00&t=42m15s

dfc 13y ago
That was interesting? You expected him to shine a light on their "icky problem"? Every community has their "icky problem" that they do not like to talk about in mixed company, if at all. The CCLA is Canonical's icky problem.

timothy0530 13y ago

Good read. Solid points

TeMPOraL 13y ago

> From my perspective the fact that good people were clearly split suggests that either option would work perfectly well. It's a nice rationality gem right here. If the costs and benefits of both options you're choosing from balance each other out, instead of carefully searching for optimal solution that will yield little marginal utility benefit you may as well toss a coin and be done with it.

yeahbutbut 13y ago
Definitely a management perspective.
- hercynium 13y ago
  Sometimes that's the best perspective to have. And in this case, I believe it is. If left up to us engineers/hackers/nerds, we would continue to stubbornly work on or with one system or the other, prolonging the debate indefinitely. And hey, if enough people really feel strongly that Upstart is superior, it's FOSS! Fork and build a community! I know it's not easy but if enough people share your passion it can happen, and that's Yet Another Reason(tm) Open Source rocks.
- mwfunk 13y ago
  No, it's an intelligent perspective. I would hope that any engineer would follow similar reasoning and arrive at similar conclusions given the facts.
gwern 13y ago
http://lesswrong.com/lw/th/harder_choices_matter_less/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/th/harder_choices_matter_less/ There's also Piet Hein's classic decision-making strategy when both strategies seem equally good: flip a coin and do what it says. And if you suddenly feel in your gut that the coin picked the wrong option, then you've discovered they weren't equally good.
- TeMPOraL 13y ago
  Actually it's where I first read that insight ;). Though I'm never able to find the link when I need it.

nly 13y ago

s/upstart/Mir/g s/systemd/Wayland/g s/2014/2015/g

arnehormann 13y ago
Your regexps are wrong, these replacements don't make any sense at all.
- SwellJoe 13y ago
  Unless there was an edit, they do actually make sense, if you think of this post as being rewritten in a year to discuss a move away from Mir (current Ubuntu graphics thing) to Wayland (current non-Ubuntu graphics thing that most everybody else is probably moving to).
  - arnehormann 13y ago
    Right now they say replace all occurrences of "upstart" with "Mir" and all occurrences of "systemd" with "Wayland". I can't see how that would work.
    - wmf 13y ago
      "Ubuntu is switching from upstart to systemd in 2014" -> "Ubuntu is switching from Mir to Wayland in 2015"
ZenoArrow 13y ago
Why would they drop Mir? Dropping Upstart makes sense because systemd has momentum and they both do basically the same job. With Mir vs. Wayland they already evaluated Wayland and decided it wasn't going to be suitable for their needs, unless Canonical change their target markets this isn't something that'd make sense to change (unless a later version of Wayland supports what they want).
- snotrockets 13y ago

angersock 13y ago

"(today our focus is on the cloud and on mobile, and we are quite clearly leading GNU/Linux on both fronts) " How is targeting two widely-different platforms focus? And how exactly is Ubuntu leading Linux in the cloud?

mistercow 13y ago
Pretty much every source I can find shows Ubuntu with a clear lead, if not an actual majority in marketshare on EC2 instances.

curtis17 13y ago

Canonical are making a bet on the graphical subsystem re Mir/QT/QML/Oneclick to crack touch/mobile. Similar to Apple going all-in on Objective C/Cocoa(Touch). But for the low level non-graphical parts of Ubuntu it makes a lot of sense to stick to standard Linux/Debian. At the terminal/sysadmin/command line level a standard setup is desirable.

dhfjgkrgjg 13y ago

Upstart although being first was never going to win against the marketing forces behind systemd. In the old days, tech was evaluated on technical merit, today the slickest marketing hucksters win. Yet another piece of lennart-ware to bring down the linux experience. Thank you BSDs for providing a sane alternative.

azinman2 13y ago

The headline made me think he was going to talk about losing the desktop and mobile wars!

vidoc 13y ago

Nice move indeed! Let's just hope that there will always be viable alternatives, just in case the systemd project ends up like pulseaudio.

vially 13y ago
How did pulseaudio ended up? It seems to me that it's quite a healthy project right now. It may have had some issues at the beginning but I can't find anything to complain about it right now.

ruben_varnish 13y ago

I am an Ubuntu member and I was deeply wondering what I was going to do next... Tollef had me realizing systemd is the future for quite a while now :-) Mark reminds us once again what the mission of Ubuntu is, why it is the best alternative for end-user computing in the FLOSS world and, for me personally, that I have a home already and do not need to go anywhere. And... onward to build on top of the great foundation we already have.

kungpooey 13y ago

Canonical, and more personally, Mark have been targets of my frustration with the Linux desktop, I moved like many others to Mint. This is a very welcome reminder that even if phrased negatively as 'lessor evils', Canonical contributes and attracts people from various backgrounds to something I sincerely want to overtake the current selection of OS options (more philosophically than anything). Canonical may not listen very well, and ultimately that may hurt any chances of desktop success for linux, however this reminds me they're still in a very small circle of 'lessor' evils.

LukeHoersten 13y ago

I'm really sad about this. I love Upstart and think it's an elegant init process implementation. Anyone more informed than myself care to summarize the key points in making the decision?

kazagistar 13y ago
The summary is essentially just that systemd is just a bit more elegant. Basically the (non gamed) votes had those two at the top, but in the end upstart had a few more pain points, and systemd had a few more features. - SystemD parallelization is more automatic. - SystemD has built in logging for all managed processes. - SystemD has Socket Activation (start process on demand) - SystemD has more momentum in other major distros (Fedora, Arch) - etc..

greatsuccess 13y ago

The "new stewards of PID 1" == welcome to your imminent doom.

mverwijs 13y ago

The flipside is that diversity in software is usually mentioned as a Good Thing. Losing Upstart means losing diversity, no?