6 ms·

Debian: Transition plan to systemd by default

83 points by mkesper 12y ago

bndr 12y ago
There's a fork of Debian without systemd [1] [1] https://devuan.org/ https://devuan.org/
- acjohnson55 12y ago
  Why is this downvoted? Knowing very little about the debate, just seeing this comment grayed out doesn't help inform me. If the comment is not helpful, I wish someone would reply with information to explain why that's so. Is Devuan a bad project for some reason? Is this spam? Or is someone just dismissive of the need for an alternative?
  - Surio 12y ago
    This whole init vs systemd has been a very divisive (and ongoing) debate, and both sides feel very strongly on their particular stance. Just look up the pages that come up for a "init vs systemd" search on the net. From what I see on the devuan page, in the spirit of FOSS, the people that prefer to keep init as part of their setup, have forked debian into devuan, and propose to retain the "init based debian", for people that prefer init scripts. That's the shortest summary I could come up with for you. Another short writeup by @tinco https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9094142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9094142
  - ReidZB 12y ago
    It looks like their domain/project name has changed, but this was discussed on Hacker News recently; the project got a fair bit of flak: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8477659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8477659 Maybe the downvoter(s) were some of the same folks who raised their concerns in the above thread? Or maybe it's just the typical systemd holy war going on. I'd guess the former though.
  - qznc 12y ago
    Many people consider it an overreaction to fork Debian for its choice of some defaults. Instead of creating this website and community, they could help Debian support its non-defaults. It's the same work anyways.
    - falcolas 12y ago
      I believe the problem here is that systemd can be introduced to a "non default" Debian system via package requirements, whereas they hope to prevent that in Devuan.
      - leni536 12y ago
        You can avoid installing systemd with apt-pinning it to negative priority if you really want to.
        falcolas 12y ago
        Which won't allow you to install certain core pieces of Debian software which have decided to rely on systemd. If I understand Devuian correctly, they will port releases of core software off of systemd and back to init, giving you the option of still using core software packages without systemd. > Devuan will derive its own installer and package repositories from Debian, modifying them where necessary, with the first goal of removing systemd
        EmanueleAina 12y ago
        > Which won't allow you to install certain core pieces of Debian software which have decided to rely on systemd. Debian is committed to support sysvinit for the next release at least. I really doubt anyone in Debian will add dependencies on systemd "just because": if they do so they may have compelling reasons (eg. ConsoleKit is unmaintained and broken) and the correct reaction would be to fix the issue (eg. like the ConsoleKit2 people are trying to do) rather than forking Debian just to ignore the issue. Not that forking Debian is bad and people should not do it for whatever irrational reason if they want: it's just that in this case there's no rational reason the same task couldn't have been carried over in Debian itself other than the fact that in your own fork you may accept lower quality contributions more easily.
  - belorn 12y ago
    Never heard about it before, but I would warn greatly against any one actually using Devuan in a production setting. If, down the line, Devuan can consistently maintain the work of pulling security updates from debian fast enough, or have their own security team doing the work, then and only then would I ever dare to use a different distro. Exception would be live-cd's, which tend to live in their own universe.
- xroche 12y ago
  A "fork", without any visible activity for months.
  - hga 12y ago
    Demonstrably not true, e.g.: http://lists.devuan.org/dwn/1424284246.7620_1.fork:2,S.html http://lists.devuan.org/dwn/1424284246.7620_1.fork:2,S.html https://git.devuan.org/devuan-infrastructure/dak https://git.devuan.org/devuan-infrastructure/dak (last commit 8 hours ago as I type this). https://git.devuan.org/packages-base/dbus https://git.devuan.org/packages-base/dbus
  - vezzy-fnord 12y ago
    They have an entire logind replacement called LoginKit (which uses ConsoleKit2 as a backend), so that's hardly "no visible activity".
smhenderson 12y ago
I know this has been discussed all over the place to the point of exhaustion but I am still somewhat shocked that Debian adopted systemd so quickly. For a distribution that is known for it's stability and conservative approach to new software I just think this happened way too fast. I've been a happy Debian user for many years but lately I've fallen back to using *BSD (particularly OpenBSD). I guess that puts me in the "old and afraid of change" camp but for me it's nice to be back using something that looks and, more importantly, _works_ like Unix. Debian will remain my goto distribution when I want/need Linux but it's no longer my first choice...
- easytiger 12y ago
  Well it may not happen quickly, depending on how long it takes to get it to stable. > but it's no longer my first choice What is out of interest?
  - smhenderson 12y ago
    I've recently replaced three lenny servers (two LAMPs and a name server) and rather than go with Wheezy I migrated the three of them to OpenBSD. On one I added apache from ports, the other I was able to use OpenBSD's new httpd and I found I really like OpenBSDs built in named. Other than that I've been playing around with FreeBSD and have revisited Slackware which was the first Linux I was introduced to via a book/cdrom back in the mid 90's. Having had some success with OpenBSD on servers I'm running it on a laptop as one of two workstations at work. The other has Wheezy on it. I'm able to do most of my day to day work on OpenBSD but do find myself remoting into the Linux box for some things (e.g. mysql-workbench).
    - Jedd 12y ago
      I am curious what you'll do (ie. what platform / distro you'll move to) do if / when *bsd adopts launchd?
      - jorgecastillo 12y ago
bhouston 12y ago
It is a herculean task to replace such a core piece of the Linux system architecture and it is amazing that this has been generally a success. This will lead to a lot more efficient and maintainability of the Linux OS for a long time to come once we get past the near term hurdles of reduced stability and various regressions (and obvious design issues to be resolved) that come from such a huge change. I'll be honest, I didn't think this was possible.
- falcolas 12y ago
  > This will lead to a lot more efficient and maintainability of the Linux OS How does consolidating functionality and control into one piece of software increase efficiency and maintainability? In my past experience, monolithic software efforts can be more efficient in the beginning, but they quickly become a maintenance nightmare as fewer and fewer people understand all of the moving parts. You don't have to look far to see the effects of this: the Linux kernel is filled with small "I'm not sure we can remove this but I don't think it does anything" comments. You can also see it in the SaaS market as they move towards microservices, away from the monoliths of yesterday. You can see it in the giant corporate structures who take 6 months to requisition a smartphone for testing which will be obsolete in another 6 months. The init system has the flaw of being too distributed to offer intelligent coordination between processes, but I'm not sure that following the pendulum swing to the complete opposite end of the spectrum was the best choice either.
  - zanny 12y ago
    Systemd is not a big blob, it is actually fairly well structured in its source repository. Each part has its own disable flags on compilation and makes independent binaries. You should think of systemd less as a "program" and more as a software compilation for the core system. Yes, there is a chance that components of systemd could suffer bitrot, but I'd argue its less likely that a project under the tutelage of Red Hat in the interests of its enterprise crowd will see the rot that other projects like xinetd have in recent years, where major contributors just stop, the whole project grinds to a halt, but because its not part of some broader software project nobody notices to pick up the slack (note, my example has gone through periods of rot and revival when someone notices its become a problem). If one component starts rotting the bugs will pile up on the systemd bug trackers and the broader project will notice and respond more efficiently since everything in systemd uses the same semantics and code formatting and the developers will be more comfortable changing their working directory than their repository.
striking 12y ago
At least they include sysvinit support. That's far nicer than any other distro.
SpaceInvader 12y ago
I have to say I am surprised. From where I sit migrating to systemd doesn't look like the best solution. But, said that, I'm gonna get some popcorn and watch another holy war starting.
tomswartz07 12y ago
I seem to remember that SystemD caused quite a stir for Debian a while back, but I don't remember exatly why. Can anyone give a (brief) explanation as to the background of the controversy?
- tinco 12y ago
  Some people claim SystemD is not in line with unix philosophy. Some think it is bug ridden. Some just feel its adoption was strong armed by political heavy weights. Some feel other solutions might be better. And others believe there was never a problem with the current solution to begin with. (I don't agree btw, just giving some info on opinions that others have)
  - falcolas 12y ago
    > Some people claim SystemD is not in line with unix philosophy One example of this interpretation - we can no longer reliably use `netstat -nlp` to determine what process is responding to requests a particular socket. In certain configurations, `netstat -nlp` will show systemd owning the socket, not the process who receives and responds to the process. e.g. Systemd will own port 80, and feed it back to Apache who listens over 8080. To determine who will truly respond, you need to know the proper systemctl incantation, or find the configuration file (there are 8 locations across 3 folder hierarchies where these can live[0]). [0] http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man5/systemd-user.conf.5.html http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man5/systemd-user.conf.5.htm...
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - jethro_tell 12y ago
      >you need to know the proper systemctl incantation Isn't this true for all commandline programs? It's a different way to do things in many ways, but this argument doesn't really talk about the merits or pitfalls, only the fact that it's different.
jkot 12y ago
I think Jessie already uses Systemd on new installations. This is just upgrade path, which makes sense, since other init systems are unsupported (nobody is doing the work).
Nursie 12y ago
I thought this was already the case? My systems that run jessie seem to have made the switch some time ago. I'm not a fan, it has caused a variety of problems (which may be teething trouble or not), I'm not a fan of its logging and I don't like that when I make changes to 'legacy' stuff in /etc/init.d systemd tells me I need to issue more commands to get it to re-read the startup scripts rather than just use them... feh.
jbb555 12y ago
I'm pretty much abandoning linux due to systemd and the fact that a tiny group of people have basically forced it on everyone despite few people wanting it and huge objections. This might not be the end of linux but it's really really harming it.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- Jedd 12y ago
  By tiny, do you mean majority of distribution maintainers?
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- revmoo 12y ago
  Same here. With everything going on with government spying it is totally realistic to expect Systemd is being forced upon Linux to open up new entry points into the OS. This would have been a crazy conspiracy theory five years ago but it's the new reality.
- crististm 12y ago
  gentoo still gives the option of openrc
- cssmoo 12y ago
  I'm not abandoning it because of systemd specifically but the whole Linux boot/init stuff is hell and the platform is death by a thousand papercuts when something goes snap. That's reason enough on its own. I recently had to rescue a CentOS 7 box with failed mdadm RAID1. Between grub, md, initrd, LVM and systemd it was three hours of hell. This was due to an md failure causing corruption on a mirror disk rather than a physical disk failure as well. Windows and FreeBSD with ZFS are beautiful in comparison. I've come to recommend those over Linux these days.
  - 12y ago
ausjke 12y ago
This hurts though I know it's coming. Debian failed me after so many years' trusts. Sadly the other options are quite limited, which is the worst part. *BSDs are not really on par for what I want(Desktop, Server and Embedded), Windows is a totally different ecosystem, what should I do?
- stringy 12y ago
  The resolution does mention there will be documentation on switching to sysv after an installation, so I assume this option will have to be officially supported; it sounds to me as though systemd is simply a default, not a requirement.
  - revmoo 12y ago
    Yes, but when half the core packages on the system list Systemd as a requirement to be installed, this doesn't really work.
  - EmanueleAina 12y ago
    Yes, it will be officially supported as systemd is simply a default, not a requirement, as defined by previous CTTE deliberations and as implemented even before them by the Debian systemd team, which has gone to great extents to make sure you can happily switch back and forth with almost no issues.
- forgotpasswd3x 12y ago
  Use systemd?
- phabian 12y ago
  Depends what you are looking for but I would look into Slackware. http://www.slackware.com/ http://www.slackware.com/
- the_mitsuhiko 12y ago
  > Sadly the other options are quite limited Jordan Hubbard already said that FreeBSD needs an systemd equivalent. OS X was the first one to get one, Windows traditionally has a general design that resembles systemd much more than any other init system. I think you are running from reality.
jwarren 12y ago
If anyone else is looking for a legible and noob-friendly explanation of this controversy, I found a decent reddit thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2jormj/eli5_the_difference_between_systemv_and_systemd/ http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2jormj/el...
- digi_owl 12y ago
  Sadly at this point in time the sysv vs systemd debate is a distraction, as systemd has grown to encompass so much more than sysv ever did. Damn it, it can be a full blown docker replacement now.
  - jwarren 12y ago
    That's pretty astonishing. Are you referring to this kind of workflow: https://goldmann.pl/blog/2014/07/30/running-docker-containers-as-systemd-services/ https://goldmann.pl/blog/2014/07/30/running-docker-container... I clearly have tons left to learn as a Sysadmin
    - digi_owl 12y ago
      Nope, you can now import docker containers into systemd-nspawn.
SoMuchToGrok 12y ago
Personally, I'm excited for the change. Waiting any longer to adopt systemd could have had serious repercussions on the entire community (across distros). Big players are already using it; RHEL7 and CoreOS. It's time for a paradigm shift with our approach on managing infrastructure. Both the sysvinit and systemd crowds have brought up great points - issues that needed to be addressed. The strong willed nature of the *nix communities is what makes them great. Strength in numbers. "Fighting" is a natural process; whether it's a team or a family. Incredibly excited to see what kind of impact this has on computing as a whole. Time to learn something new.
anh79 12y ago
before: update-rc.d foobar enable (or service foobar enable) after: systemctl enable foobar It's the position of the verb that makes war. ^^
JoshTriplett 12y ago
This announcement isn't as significant as it seems. As mentioned in the mail, Debian has already transitioned to using systemd by default for the upcoming jessie release, for both new installs and upgrades, with a carefully orchestrated transition coordinated between the sysvinit, upstart, and systemd maintainers. (That transition includes the ability for sysvinit and systemd to co-exist on the same system, choosing which one to boot at boot time with init= or a GRUB menu option, rather than having the packages conflict at installation time.) This announcement only occurred because, after that transition, someone formerly on the technical committee (now resigned, but a member at the time) attempted to use the technical committee to force a revert of that transition. This announcement is effectively the current technical committee saying "nope, the other teams in Debian have done a fine job arranging this transition, and we're not going to overrule anyone". (I helped draft this proposal, and spent a fair bit of time trying to make sure it would not be taken as changing the current state of affairs in any way, only affirming the work others had already done.)
eleitl 12y ago
This was the final straw that broke the camel's back and the reason why I'm transitioning to the *BSD ecosystem.

83 points by mkesper 12y ago

bndr 12y ago

There's a fork of Debian without systemd [1] [1] https://devuan.org/ https://devuan.org/

acjohnson55 12y ago
Why is this downvoted? Knowing very little about the debate, just seeing this comment grayed out doesn't help inform me. If the comment is not helpful, I wish someone would reply with information to explain why that's so. Is Devuan a bad project for some reason? Is this spam? Or is someone just dismissive of the need for an alternative?
- Surio 12y ago
  This whole init vs systemd has been a very divisive (and ongoing) debate, and both sides feel very strongly on their particular stance. Just look up the pages that come up for a "init vs systemd" search on the net. From what I see on the devuan page, in the spirit of FOSS, the people that prefer to keep init as part of their setup, have forked debian into devuan, and propose to retain the "init based debian", for people that prefer init scripts. That's the shortest summary I could come up with for you. Another short writeup by @tinco https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9094142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9094142
- ReidZB 12y ago
  It looks like their domain/project name has changed, but this was discussed on Hacker News recently; the project got a fair bit of flak: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8477659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8477659 Maybe the downvoter(s) were some of the same folks who raised their concerns in the above thread? Or maybe it's just the typical systemd holy war going on. I'd guess the former though.
- qznc 12y ago
  Many people consider it an overreaction to fork Debian for its choice of some defaults. Instead of creating this website and community, they could help Debian support its non-defaults. It's the same work anyways.
  - falcolas 12y ago
    I believe the problem here is that systemd can be introduced to a "non default" Debian system via package requirements, whereas they hope to prevent that in Devuan.
    - leni536 12y ago
      You can avoid installing systemd with apt-pinning it to negative priority if you really want to.
      - falcolas 12y ago
        Which won't allow you to install certain core pieces of Debian software which have decided to rely on systemd. If I understand Devuian correctly, they will port releases of core software off of systemd and back to init, giving you the option of still using core software packages without systemd. > Devuan will derive its own installer and package repositories from Debian, modifying them where necessary, with the first goal of removing systemd
        EmanueleAina 12y ago
        > Which won't allow you to install certain core pieces of Debian software which have decided to rely on systemd. Debian is committed to support sysvinit for the next release at least. I really doubt anyone in Debian will add dependencies on systemd "just because": if they do so they may have compelling reasons (eg. ConsoleKit is unmaintained and broken) and the correct reaction would be to fix the issue (eg. like the ConsoleKit2 people are trying to do) rather than forking Debian just to ignore the issue. Not that forking Debian is bad and people should not do it for whatever irrational reason if they want: it's just that in this case there's no rational reason the same task couldn't have been carried over in Debian itself other than the fact that in your own fork you may accept lower quality contributions more easily.
- belorn 12y ago
  Never heard about it before, but I would warn greatly against any one actually using Devuan in a production setting. If, down the line, Devuan can consistently maintain the work of pulling security updates from debian fast enough, or have their own security team doing the work, then and only then would I ever dare to use a different distro. Exception would be live-cd's, which tend to live in their own universe.
xroche 12y ago
A "fork", without any visible activity for months.
- hga 12y ago
  Demonstrably not true, e.g.: http://lists.devuan.org/dwn/1424284246.7620_1.fork:2,S.html http://lists.devuan.org/dwn/1424284246.7620_1.fork:2,S.html https://git.devuan.org/devuan-infrastructure/dak https://git.devuan.org/devuan-infrastructure/dak (last commit 8 hours ago as I type this). https://git.devuan.org/packages-base/dbus https://git.devuan.org/packages-base/dbus
- vezzy-fnord 12y ago
  They have an entire logind replacement called LoginKit (which uses ConsoleKit2 as a backend), so that's hardly "no visible activity".

smhenderson 12y ago

I know this has been discussed all over the place to the point of exhaustion but I am still somewhat shocked that Debian adopted systemd so quickly. For a distribution that is known for it's stability and conservative approach to new software I just think this happened way too fast. I've been a happy Debian user for many years but lately I've fallen back to using *BSD (particularly OpenBSD). I guess that puts me in the "old and afraid of change" camp but for me it's nice to be back using something that looks and, more importantly, _works_ like Unix. Debian will remain my goto distribution when I want/need Linux but it's no longer my first choice...

easytiger 12y ago
Well it may not happen quickly, depending on how long it takes to get it to stable. > but it's no longer my first choice What is out of interest?
- smhenderson 12y ago
  I've recently replaced three lenny servers (two LAMPs and a name server) and rather than go with Wheezy I migrated the three of them to OpenBSD. On one I added apache from ports, the other I was able to use OpenBSD's new httpd and I found I really like OpenBSDs built in named. Other than that I've been playing around with FreeBSD and have revisited Slackware which was the first Linux I was introduced to via a book/cdrom back in the mid 90's. Having had some success with OpenBSD on servers I'm running it on a laptop as one of two workstations at work. The other has Wheezy on it. I'm able to do most of my day to day work on OpenBSD but do find myself remoting into the Linux box for some things (e.g. mysql-workbench).
  - Jedd 12y ago
    I am curious what you'll do (ie. what platform / distro you'll move to) do if / when *bsd adopts launchd?
    - jorgecastillo 12y ago

bhouston 12y ago

It is a herculean task to replace such a core piece of the Linux system architecture and it is amazing that this has been generally a success. This will lead to a lot more efficient and maintainability of the Linux OS for a long time to come once we get past the near term hurdles of reduced stability and various regressions (and obvious design issues to be resolved) that come from such a huge change. I'll be honest, I didn't think this was possible.

falcolas 12y ago
> This will lead to a lot more efficient and maintainability of the Linux OS How does consolidating functionality and control into one piece of software increase efficiency and maintainability? In my past experience, monolithic software efforts can be more efficient in the beginning, but they quickly become a maintenance nightmare as fewer and fewer people understand all of the moving parts. You don't have to look far to see the effects of this: the Linux kernel is filled with small "I'm not sure we can remove this but I don't think it does anything" comments. You can also see it in the SaaS market as they move towards microservices, away from the monoliths of yesterday. You can see it in the giant corporate structures who take 6 months to requisition a smartphone for testing which will be obsolete in another 6 months. The init system has the flaw of being too distributed to offer intelligent coordination between processes, but I'm not sure that following the pendulum swing to the complete opposite end of the spectrum was the best choice either.
- zanny 12y ago
  Systemd is not a big blob, it is actually fairly well structured in its source repository. Each part has its own disable flags on compilation and makes independent binaries. You should think of systemd less as a "program" and more as a software compilation for the core system. Yes, there is a chance that components of systemd could suffer bitrot, but I'd argue its less likely that a project under the tutelage of Red Hat in the interests of its enterprise crowd will see the rot that other projects like xinetd have in recent years, where major contributors just stop, the whole project grinds to a halt, but because its not part of some broader software project nobody notices to pick up the slack (note, my example has gone through periods of rot and revival when someone notices its become a problem). If one component starts rotting the bugs will pile up on the systemd bug trackers and the broader project will notice and respond more efficiently since everything in systemd uses the same semantics and code formatting and the developers will be more comfortable changing their working directory than their repository.

striking 12y ago

At least they include sysvinit support. That's far nicer than any other distro.

SpaceInvader 12y ago

I have to say I am surprised. From where I sit migrating to systemd doesn't look like the best solution. But, said that, I'm gonna get some popcorn and watch another holy war starting.

tomswartz07 12y ago

I seem to remember that SystemD caused quite a stir for Debian a while back, but I don't remember exatly why. Can anyone give a (brief) explanation as to the background of the controversy?

tinco 12y ago
Some people claim SystemD is not in line with unix philosophy. Some think it is bug ridden. Some just feel its adoption was strong armed by political heavy weights. Some feel other solutions might be better. And others believe there was never a problem with the current solution to begin with. (I don't agree btw, just giving some info on opinions that others have)
- falcolas 12y ago
  > Some people claim SystemD is not in line with unix philosophy One example of this interpretation - we can no longer reliably use `netstat -nlp` to determine what process is responding to requests a particular socket. In certain configurations, `netstat -nlp` will show systemd owning the socket, not the process who receives and responds to the process. e.g. Systemd will own port 80, and feed it back to Apache who listens over 8080. To determine who will truly respond, you need to know the proper systemctl incantation, or find the configuration file (there are 8 locations across 3 folder hierarchies where these can live[0]). [0] http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man5/systemd-user.conf.5.html http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man5/systemd-user.conf.5.htm...
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - jethro_tell 12y ago
    >you need to know the proper systemctl incantation Isn't this true for all commandline programs? It's a different way to do things in many ways, but this argument doesn't really talk about the merits or pitfalls, only the fact that it's different.

jkot 12y ago

I think Jessie already uses Systemd on new installations. This is just upgrade path, which makes sense, since other init systems are unsupported (nobody is doing the work).

Nursie 12y ago

I thought this was already the case? My systems that run jessie seem to have made the switch some time ago. I'm not a fan, it has caused a variety of problems (which may be teething trouble or not), I'm not a fan of its logging and I don't like that when I make changes to 'legacy' stuff in /etc/init.d systemd tells me I need to issue more commands to get it to re-read the startup scripts rather than just use them... feh.

jbb555 12y ago

I'm pretty much abandoning linux due to systemd and the fact that a tiny group of people have basically forced it on everyone despite few people wanting it and huge objections. This might not be the end of linux but it's really really harming it.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
Jedd 12y ago
By tiny, do you mean majority of distribution maintainers?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
revmoo 12y ago
Same here. With everything going on with government spying it is totally realistic to expect Systemd is being forced upon Linux to open up new entry points into the OS. This would have been a crazy conspiracy theory five years ago but it's the new reality.
crististm 12y ago
gentoo still gives the option of openrc
cssmoo 12y ago
I'm not abandoning it because of systemd specifically but the whole Linux boot/init stuff is hell and the platform is death by a thousand papercuts when something goes snap. That's reason enough on its own. I recently had to rescue a CentOS 7 box with failed mdadm RAID1. Between grub, md, initrd, LVM and systemd it was three hours of hell. This was due to an md failure causing corruption on a mirror disk rather than a physical disk failure as well. Windows and FreeBSD with ZFS are beautiful in comparison. I've come to recommend those over Linux these days.
- 12y ago

ausjke 12y ago

This hurts though I know it's coming. Debian failed me after so many years' trusts. Sadly the other options are quite limited, which is the worst part. *BSDs are not really on par for what I want(Desktop, Server and Embedded), Windows is a totally different ecosystem, what should I do?

stringy 12y ago
The resolution does mention there will be documentation on switching to sysv after an installation, so I assume this option will have to be officially supported; it sounds to me as though systemd is simply a default, not a requirement.
- revmoo 12y ago
  Yes, but when half the core packages on the system list Systemd as a requirement to be installed, this doesn't really work.
- EmanueleAina 12y ago
  Yes, it will be officially supported as systemd is simply a default, not a requirement, as defined by previous CTTE deliberations and as implemented even before them by the Debian systemd team, which has gone to great extents to make sure you can happily switch back and forth with almost no issues.
forgotpasswd3x 12y ago
Use systemd?
phabian 12y ago
Depends what you are looking for but I would look into Slackware. http://www.slackware.com/ http://www.slackware.com/
the_mitsuhiko 12y ago
> Sadly the other options are quite limited Jordan Hubbard already said that FreeBSD needs an systemd equivalent. OS X was the first one to get one, Windows traditionally has a general design that resembles systemd much more than any other init system. I think you are running from reality.

jwarren 12y ago

If anyone else is looking for a legible and noob-friendly explanation of this controversy, I found a decent reddit thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2jormj/eli5_the_difference_between_systemv_and_systemd/ http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2jormj/el...

digi_owl 12y ago
Sadly at this point in time the sysv vs systemd debate is a distraction, as systemd has grown to encompass so much more than sysv ever did. Damn it, it can be a full blown docker replacement now.
- jwarren 12y ago
  That's pretty astonishing. Are you referring to this kind of workflow: https://goldmann.pl/blog/2014/07/30/running-docker-containers-as-systemd-services/ https://goldmann.pl/blog/2014/07/30/running-docker-container... I clearly have tons left to learn as a Sysadmin
  - digi_owl 12y ago
    Nope, you can now import docker containers into systemd-nspawn.

SoMuchToGrok 12y ago

Personally, I'm excited for the change. Waiting any longer to adopt systemd could have had serious repercussions on the entire community (across distros). Big players are already using it; RHEL7 and CoreOS. It's time for a paradigm shift with our approach on managing infrastructure. Both the sysvinit and systemd crowds have brought up great points - issues that needed to be addressed. The strong willed nature of the *nix communities is what makes them great. Strength in numbers. "Fighting" is a natural process; whether it's a team or a family. Incredibly excited to see what kind of impact this has on computing as a whole. Time to learn something new.

anh79 12y ago

before: update-rc.d foobar enable (or service foobar enable) after: systemctl enable foobar It's the position of the verb that makes war. ^^

JoshTriplett 12y ago

This announcement isn't as significant as it seems. As mentioned in the mail, Debian has already transitioned to using systemd by default for the upcoming jessie release, for both new installs and upgrades, with a carefully orchestrated transition coordinated between the sysvinit, upstart, and systemd maintainers. (That transition includes the ability for sysvinit and systemd to co-exist on the same system, choosing which one to boot at boot time with init= or a GRUB menu option, rather than having the packages conflict at installation time.) This announcement only occurred because, after that transition, someone formerly on the technical committee (now resigned, but a member at the time) attempted to use the technical committee to force a revert of that transition. This announcement is effectively the current technical committee saying "nope, the other teams in Debian have done a fine job arranging this transition, and we're not going to overrule anyone". (I helped draft this proposal, and spent a fair bit of time trying to make sure it would not be taken as changing the current state of affairs in any way, only affirming the work others had already done.)

eleitl 12y ago

This was the final straw that broke the camel's back and the reason why I'm transitioning to the *BSD ecosystem.