11 ms·

Can someone provide context for this? I am not familiar with Debian and do not know the back-story. Also, I assume this is not directly related to the recent r

by privong 12y ago

Can someone provide context for this? I am not familiar with Debian and do not know the back-story. Also, I assume this is not directly related to the recent resignation[0] of Heen. But does the resignation of two people (whose resignations were deemed worthy of being voted to near the top of the HN front page) within a few day span suggest concernening structural issues or is this just poisson statistics at work? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8617874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8617874

walterbell 12y ago
Proposal: https://lwn.net/Articles/616571/ https://lwn.net/Articles/616571/ Vote: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2014/11/msg00891.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2014/11/msg00891.html
- pilif 12y ago
  I get that there's a lot of politics in Debian. I also get that systemd is a controversial topic, but is this really a vote that just came out with the result that no vote was needed? How many votes will there be about systemd in Debian that will turn out inconclusive? Also, I have yet to see a single article of somebody running into all the various horror scenarios envisioned by adversaries of systemd. I mean: Multiple distros have already switched and there still aren't that many blog posts about systems dying in flames because of the switch. I would so love for this discussion to happen based on technical merits and (by now actually available) real world experiences than FUD (on both sides)
  - _delirium 12y ago
    The outcome of the vote was something roughly like, "The General Resolution (GR) process is not the right venue to resolve this issue". The GR process has traditionally been used rarely, and mainly for "meta" things (deciding how Debian Developers are approved, that kind of thing). So it's not a huge surprise that sentiment against involving the GR process in the "init wars" was high.
    - VLM 12y ago
      All GRs also have a meta-option of "more discussion needed". Sort of a "no confidence" vote on all the candidates/options although in actual use unless it comes in first, when ranking it creates a border something like "absolutely positively no way". Technically the "no GR needed" people were abusing the system and should have just put "more discussion needed" as their highest rank. Its the same concept but this is a "funny" rephrasing of the same concept. Perhaps the only thing everyone on all sides can agree on is funny, is that "further discussion" didn't get many votes. Somewhere last night I read a quote about there's hundreds on each side but only nine masochists who voted for "further discussion"
  - yaantc 12y ago
    I think this is the last vote related to systemd for a while. There can only be a single default init system obviously, so a vote was required there. It was a hot topic, no need to rehash this. The second vote, initiated by Ian Jackson, was controversial from the start. A lot of people were tired about the init topic and wanted to move on, and didn't want the GR. And they got the majority here: the result of the vote is "General Resolution is not required". This is the majority clearly expressing it's now time to move on. And to be honest I'm happy about this, although I'm just a Debian user and do not vote. With this, it's now unlikely to be another vote. And this desire to move on can be now felt on all sides of the argument, hence the resignations and people moving to other things. I just want to point out that except for Joey Hess (really sorry about that) all are still remaining part of Debian. They just move out of the TC (or systemd maintainership) but are still DD, working on some parts of Debian. And now, hopefully, everyone can cool off and move to other things too.
  - deong 12y ago
    If adopting systemd actually broke everything, then of course they'd be doing something else instead. The anti-systemd crowd looks at this issue the way you might look at someone who took a working piece of software, and then did a completely correct transformation of all loops and conditionals to use bare gotos. It's not incorrect to do that. Nothing crashes. It might actually even be faster or use less memory if you were sufficiently clever about it. However, the argument is that you just bought yourself a future full of pain and misery for not a big enough present gain. Look at poor technical decisions from the past. The earliest browsers were encouraged to be liberal in what they accepted (an adaptation of Postel's law to HTML parsing). I think a lot of people today regard that as a decision that probably held the internet back by a decade -- think of the time we wasted writing compatibility layers and artificially restricting what our web pages could do. But it wasn't immediately obvious that that was the case. It took 10 or 15 years for the implications of that decision to really hit home. What happens next is not a collapse of the world. It's a slow accrual of follow-up decisions that are needed to keep the lights on, until one day you look at the Eldritch horror you've had to build over 10 years and go, "Jesus, that was a bone-headed idea." Maybe they're completely wrong in opposing it, but systemd isn't anywhere near old enough to have decided that just yet.
    - walterbell 12y ago
      Someone needs to dedicate an academic thesis to documenting how systemd advocates pulled off their coup, and what improvements are needed to OSS governance structures to prevent a repeat. By the time the pain becomes visible, no one will remember how the actual decision got made.
      - digi_owl 12y ago
        A bunch of devs scratching itches, Just so happened that their scratching sticks where tired together and covered in super glue.
      - the_why_of_y 12y ago
        Yes definitely, and the thesis should discuss in detail the role of the Illuminati in getting systemd adopted, and provide a by-the-minute protocol of what went down at Area 51.
  - digi_owl 12y ago
    I keep seeing the odd one over at G+. One i found some months back when the whole systemd issue got my attention was of someone that ended up doing a parallel arch install to read the journald logs. Going from memory the problem seemed to be that he could not run the required command to get the logs dumped into readable form without systemd running as pid1. And systemd was refusing to boot for no apparent reason. Thats the kind of thing that will get seasoned admins, that are used to cat being all you need to get at the logs, backing away with a "no way, no how".
    - teddyh 12y ago
      This “binary logs!” thing is approaching FUD-like levels. “The logs” will not be binary. The logs will be where they have always been, in the format they have always been in. Sure, journald has some binary logs of its own, but it puts all the log messages also into the normal syslog daemon, so nothing changes. As far as I can tell, the whole brouhaha started when there was a bug in the packaging of syslog-ng so it would not start properly after installing systemd. Since syslog-ng was not running, the only logs left were journald’s binary logs, and people assumed that “systemd ate my log files!”. No. It was a bug, the bug was not even in systemd, your log files will always be where you want them. Unless you uninstall your syslog daemon, but then you are on your own.
      - jude- 12y ago
        Either I'm using journald to log to a binary format, or I'm having journald forward everything to syslog. If I'm trying to avoid binary logs in the first place, then there's really no point for journald to be running--just forward directly to syslog in the first place. Journald is just dead weight in this use-case.
        teddyh 12y ago
        Actually, journald exists for a number of reasons, listed here: https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1IC9yOXj7j6cdLLxWEBAGRL6wl97tFxgjLUEHIX3MSTs https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1IC9yOXj7j6cdLLxWEBA...
danieldk 12y ago
You missed some: https://lwn.net/Articles/621895/ https://lwn.net/Articles/621895/ https://lwn.net/Articles/621003/ https://lwn.net/Articles/621003/ https://lwn.net/Articles/620879/ https://lwn.net/Articles/620879/ https://lwn.net/Articles/620878/ https://lwn.net/Articles/620878/ https://lwn.net/Articles/619749/ https://lwn.net/Articles/619749/ They are related in the sense that are all fall-out of the struggle to integrate or block systemd in Debian and/or how it exposed some problems with the Debian constitution. It's a shame to see that so much talent is lost and frustrated over what in my eyes seems to be a small issue. systemd and Upstart are both a large improvement over the System V init scripts. So, it's quite logical that it should be replaced at some point. Since systemd seems to have the most traction in other major distributions and upstream software, it makes sense to make that the default, while making it still possible to switch to Upstart et al. if someone wants to (at the risk of losing support for some upstream software). If it turns out in three years that systemd is a dead-end, rip it out, and use whatever is better then. Distributions did that with devfs, the old hotplug scripts, egcs (which was merged back in mainline), etc.
- zaphar 12y ago
  I get the impression which is admittedly informed by very cursory examination of the issues that ripping systemd out may be far more difficult than ripping say, Upstart. Systemd seems to have taken the approach of owning far more than just the Systemv init stuff and that removing it might entail sweeping changes to huge parts of a linux distribution. Systemd does seem to be pushing somewhat of a lock-in strategy and for many in the linux community that rubs them the wrong way. Personally I don't really care much either way.
  - danieldk 12y ago
    I get the impression which is admittedly informed by very cursory examination of the issues that ripping systemd out may be far more difficult than ripping say, Upstart. Definitely. But this is probably true for many things at a low-level in the stack. E.g., it would also be hard to replace D-BUS or the Linux kernel (as evidenced by the fact that Debian/KFreeBSD will probably not be in Jessy). I agree that it is a worry. But you can never make progress without taking any risks. We have tried 'fully isolated init' for years and it does not really work for modern systems/applications.
pjc50 12y ago
Ian Jackson has been involved with Debian for 20 years and is not one to back down easily in an argument or quit over trivia.

by privong 12y ago

walterbell 12y ago

Proposal: https://lwn.net/Articles/616571/ https://lwn.net/Articles/616571/ Vote: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2014/11/msg00891.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2014/11/msg00891.html

pilif 12y ago
I get that there's a lot of politics in Debian. I also get that systemd is a controversial topic, but is this really a vote that just came out with the result that no vote was needed? How many votes will there be about systemd in Debian that will turn out inconclusive? Also, I have yet to see a single article of somebody running into all the various horror scenarios envisioned by adversaries of systemd. I mean: Multiple distros have already switched and there still aren't that many blog posts about systems dying in flames because of the switch. I would so love for this discussion to happen based on technical merits and (by now actually available) real world experiences than FUD (on both sides)
- _delirium 12y ago
  The outcome of the vote was something roughly like, "The General Resolution (GR) process is not the right venue to resolve this issue". The GR process has traditionally been used rarely, and mainly for "meta" things (deciding how Debian Developers are approved, that kind of thing). So it's not a huge surprise that sentiment against involving the GR process in the "init wars" was high.
  - VLM 12y ago
    All GRs also have a meta-option of "more discussion needed". Sort of a "no confidence" vote on all the candidates/options although in actual use unless it comes in first, when ranking it creates a border something like "absolutely positively no way". Technically the "no GR needed" people were abusing the system and should have just put "more discussion needed" as their highest rank. Its the same concept but this is a "funny" rephrasing of the same concept. Perhaps the only thing everyone on all sides can agree on is funny, is that "further discussion" didn't get many votes. Somewhere last night I read a quote about there's hundreds on each side but only nine masochists who voted for "further discussion"
- yaantc 12y ago
  I think this is the last vote related to systemd for a while. There can only be a single default init system obviously, so a vote was required there. It was a hot topic, no need to rehash this. The second vote, initiated by Ian Jackson, was controversial from the start. A lot of people were tired about the init topic and wanted to move on, and didn't want the GR. And they got the majority here: the result of the vote is "General Resolution is not required". This is the majority clearly expressing it's now time to move on. And to be honest I'm happy about this, although I'm just a Debian user and do not vote. With this, it's now unlikely to be another vote. And this desire to move on can be now felt on all sides of the argument, hence the resignations and people moving to other things. I just want to point out that except for Joey Hess (really sorry about that) all are still remaining part of Debian. They just move out of the TC (or systemd maintainership) but are still DD, working on some parts of Debian. And now, hopefully, everyone can cool off and move to other things too.
- deong 12y ago
  If adopting systemd actually broke everything, then of course they'd be doing something else instead. The anti-systemd crowd looks at this issue the way you might look at someone who took a working piece of software, and then did a completely correct transformation of all loops and conditionals to use bare gotos. It's not incorrect to do that. Nothing crashes. It might actually even be faster or use less memory if you were sufficiently clever about it. However, the argument is that you just bought yourself a future full of pain and misery for not a big enough present gain. Look at poor technical decisions from the past. The earliest browsers were encouraged to be liberal in what they accepted (an adaptation of Postel's law to HTML parsing). I think a lot of people today regard that as a decision that probably held the internet back by a decade -- think of the time we wasted writing compatibility layers and artificially restricting what our web pages could do. But it wasn't immediately obvious that that was the case. It took 10 or 15 years for the implications of that decision to really hit home. What happens next is not a collapse of the world. It's a slow accrual of follow-up decisions that are needed to keep the lights on, until one day you look at the Eldritch horror you've had to build over 10 years and go, "Jesus, that was a bone-headed idea." Maybe they're completely wrong in opposing it, but systemd isn't anywhere near old enough to have decided that just yet.
  - walterbell 12y ago
    Someone needs to dedicate an academic thesis to documenting how systemd advocates pulled off their coup, and what improvements are needed to OSS governance structures to prevent a repeat. By the time the pain becomes visible, no one will remember how the actual decision got made.
    - digi_owl 12y ago
      A bunch of devs scratching itches, Just so happened that their scratching sticks where tired together and covered in super glue.
    - the_why_of_y 12y ago
      Yes definitely, and the thesis should discuss in detail the role of the Illuminati in getting systemd adopted, and provide a by-the-minute protocol of what went down at Area 51.
- digi_owl 12y ago
  I keep seeing the odd one over at G+. One i found some months back when the whole systemd issue got my attention was of someone that ended up doing a parallel arch install to read the journald logs. Going from memory the problem seemed to be that he could not run the required command to get the logs dumped into readable form without systemd running as pid1. And systemd was refusing to boot for no apparent reason. Thats the kind of thing that will get seasoned admins, that are used to cat being all you need to get at the logs, backing away with a "no way, no how".
  - teddyh 12y ago
    This “binary logs!” thing is approaching FUD-like levels. “The logs” will not be binary. The logs will be where they have always been, in the format they have always been in. Sure, journald has some binary logs of its own, but it puts all the log messages also into the normal syslog daemon, so nothing changes. As far as I can tell, the whole brouhaha started when there was a bug in the packaging of syslog-ng so it would not start properly after installing systemd. Since syslog-ng was not running, the only logs left were journald’s binary logs, and people assumed that “systemd ate my log files!”. No. It was a bug, the bug was not even in systemd, your log files will always be where you want them. Unless you uninstall your syslog daemon, but then you are on your own.
    - jude- 12y ago
      Either I'm using journald to log to a binary format, or I'm having journald forward everything to syslog. If I'm trying to avoid binary logs in the first place, then there's really no point for journald to be running--just forward directly to syslog in the first place. Journald is just dead weight in this use-case.
      - teddyh 12y ago
        Actually, journald exists for a number of reasons, listed here: https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1IC9yOXj7j6cdLLxWEBAGRL6wl97tFxgjLUEHIX3MSTs https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1IC9yOXj7j6cdLLxWEBA...

danieldk 12y ago

You missed some: https://lwn.net/Articles/621895/ https://lwn.net/Articles/621895/ https://lwn.net/Articles/621003/ https://lwn.net/Articles/621003/ https://lwn.net/Articles/620879/ https://lwn.net/Articles/620879/ https://lwn.net/Articles/620878/ https://lwn.net/Articles/620878/ https://lwn.net/Articles/619749/ https://lwn.net/Articles/619749/ They are related in the sense that are all fall-out of the struggle to integrate or block systemd in Debian and/or how it exposed some problems with the Debian constitution. It's a shame to see that so much talent is lost and frustrated over what in my eyes seems to be a small issue. systemd and Upstart are both a large improvement over the System V init scripts. So, it's quite logical that it should be replaced at some point. Since systemd seems to have the most traction in other major distributions and upstream software, it makes sense to make that the default, while making it still possible to switch to Upstart et al. if someone wants to (at the risk of losing support for some upstream software). If it turns out in three years that systemd is a dead-end, rip it out, and use whatever is better then. Distributions did that with devfs, the old hotplug scripts, egcs (which was merged back in mainline), etc.

zaphar 12y ago
I get the impression which is admittedly informed by very cursory examination of the issues that ripping systemd out may be far more difficult than ripping say, Upstart. Systemd seems to have taken the approach of owning far more than just the Systemv init stuff and that removing it might entail sweeping changes to huge parts of a linux distribution. Systemd does seem to be pushing somewhat of a lock-in strategy and for many in the linux community that rubs them the wrong way. Personally I don't really care much either way.
- danieldk 12y ago
  I get the impression which is admittedly informed by very cursory examination of the issues that ripping systemd out may be far more difficult than ripping say, Upstart. Definitely. But this is probably true for many things at a low-level in the stack. E.g., it would also be hard to replace D-BUS or the Linux kernel (as evidenced by the fact that Debian/KFreeBSD will probably not be in Jessy). I agree that it is a worry. But you can never make progress without taking any risks. We have tried 'fully isolated init' for years and it does not really work for modern systems/applications.

pjc50 12y ago

Ian Jackson has been involved with Debian for 20 years and is not one to back down easily in an argument or quit over trivia.