5 ms·

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 distr

• 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
        OpenBSD will never have launchd (licensing policy)!
        • akkar 12y ago
          launchd use the Apache License how can they have a license policy against that?
    • deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
• nailer 12y ago
  > For a distribution that is known for it's stability and conservative approach to new software I imagine many people might trust systemd more than the overlapping set of init/cron/at/supevisord/monit/forever/user generated SysV init shell scripts of varying quality.
• Aardwolf 12y ago
  I don't really understand the force that makes so many distros adopt systemd either. Who/what is driving this despite all the controverse?
  • lutoma 12y ago
    Personal opinions from the user perspective aside, it's significantly easier to maintain from a distribution / package maintainer perspective, so it's unsurprising they'd want to switch.
  • chriswarbo 12y ago
    I think that force is just the developers and maintainers of distros and upstream projects. Code contributions, even if controversial, pack a much stronger punch than emails, forum posts, blog posts, etc.
  • jjoonathan 12y ago
    The fact that it did many things easily and correctly that init/cron/monit only did after navigating a minefield of gotchas, reinventing the wheel, and employing obnoxious hacks to do things that ought to be simple (parallel init). Init scripts are easier to tweak, no doubt about it, but I'm equally sure that if I was actually throwing together a distro I would want a modern init system. Also, remember that launchd on OSX has been around for a decade. People from the linux world who encountered it tended to think "hey, this is kinda nice, I wish we had something like it." Perhaps launchd itself had a predecessor somewhere, I dunno. But the point is that people had seen these systems in the wild, so when someone showed up who was serious about seeing the project through there were a bunch of maintainers whose reaction was "about damn time" rather than "what is this?"
    • XorNot 12y ago
      I've found service files much easier to tweak then init scripts. When 90% of all init scripts become a single line exec command, there's not a lot to go wrong.
  • coldtea 12y ago
• ReidZB 12y ago
  I think Debian has taken a conservative approach. For example, Arch adopted systemd as its default years ago, which means it was already stable enough for daily use years ago (although I think Arch helped pave the way for its adoption by the larger distros). systemd is not really "new" software anymore; it's been around the block a few times. Even RHEL7 has adopted systemd. I suppose one might say that this is a core component of the system and even three or so years of testing is not enough... But, I think at that point, we're off in the realm of opinion.
  • chisleu 12y ago
    Fedora was using it as default for a year before Arch. Redhat definitely paved the way. Many were slow to adopt it because it was such a radical change and most of the changes were seen as boons only for the virtualization stack that Redhat was working with. I love Arch too, but damn! I remember the "upgrade" process to systemd that wrecked my system (not unrecoverably, but before they released the fix path, I already reinstalled.)
    • ReidZB 12y ago
      Huh. I didn't know that about Fedora. I admit I don't keep up with the Red Hat world as much as I should. So, apparently systemd has been in production distros for, what, four or five years now? I don't remember the systemd transition in Arch being too bad, though it was sort of rough around the edges. I guess that roughness is why (mentally) I hadn't expected anyone to have adopted systemd before Arch.
      • zanny 12y ago
        It wasn't even bad on Fedora, it was in rawhide for over a year being worked on before entering Fedora 15, albeit they transitioned from upstart to systemd, which I'd think is a lot less significant a transition than from sysv to systemd.
        • digi_owl 12y ago
          Also, systemd has really "grown" over the years. Adopting systemd when it was just about handing services was one thing. But now it does networking (firewall management included), job scheduling, and more. It is almost as if you can see the frog slowly boiling...
• toolz 12y ago
  What are you talking about? Debian had systemd on the discussion list for years and it was the default init system for other distros for just as long. What exactly about years of discussion doesn't align with the conservative choices of their other software defaults? Here's an article where debian is talking about systemd in 2011 [0]. Forgive me for beign a bit shocked when people say things like 'it happened so fast!', but it's almost like people just sincerely want to hate systemd. [0]http://lwn.net/Articles/452865/ http://lwn.net/Articles/452865/ edit: I really wanted to ignore this, but it's eating away at me. >and, more importantly, _works_ like Unix. Maybe I'm just cynical, but I get the feeling people who pretend their interpretation of the unix philosophy regarding systemd is the superior interpretation, probably didn't even know what the tenets of unix philosophy were before the drama.
  • agumonkey 12y ago
    Maybe it's relative to systemd reach in the OS and the fact that it's not a no brainer (this topic as proof). How many deep changes Debian did before (I think there was a glibc/eglibc swap at one point) ?
    • toolz 12y ago
      So how many years of discussion have to happen before you would consider it thoroughly discussed? How many years of top distro's using it by default before you would consider it vetted?
      • agumonkey 12y ago
        From my interpretation of smhenderson's post, one of Debian values was a very slow pace of change and old but well known pieces. In this light, systemd still seems too controversial. Fedora adopted it because it was an in-house project, archlinux tries to use cutting edge as much as possible, so it's irrelevant for that interpretation. I only read part of the Debian voting process, it's wasn't years but I admit not knowing how long systemd was discussed in Debian's ML before that. On archlinux board's, adoption was quickly reached (without too much user troubles).
• xroche 12y ago
  So quickly ? This non-issue has been pending for months now, mainly because of non-technical, ridiculous (ie. religious war with sysv) reasons, and we will at last go forward with it. Yes, it is far from being perfect (I personally never really liked systemd), but this is a huge step forward anyway. It's 2015 and we are still using crappy init shell scripts to start demons, and crappy text files to configure every piece of network. We need to move forward.
  • ff_ 12y ago
    Can you tell me exactly when text files have started being "crappy"?
    • xroche 12y ago
      "Crappy" in the sense that every piece of network has its own file format, which is parsed by different tools. But the worst part is probably init scripts. $ wc -l /etc/init.d/smartd 653 /etc/init.d/smartd 653 lines of code to start a demon, because of the differences between all distros. Guys, seriously ?
      • vezzy-fnord 12y ago
        It's actually because of, I'm sorry to put it so bluntly, distribution maintainer incompetence in the form of not modularizing common script functions, bolting on hacks like start-stop-daemon, startpar and insserv to achieve primitive asynchronicity and service dependencies, and to an extent the failings of sysvinit itself with providing little tools to contain the environment and enforcing messy symlink farms. What you're doing is the equivalent of looking at some old Mach performance statistics and concluding that microkernels cannot possibly work... never mind there's one alongside every smartphone.
    • coldtea 12y ago
      Around 1998 or so. They always were an incompatible mess of differing configuration formats, "standards" and kludges, but it was ok for the first 2-3 decades of UNIX...
  • 12y ago
• upofadown 12y ago
  I have been looking at OpenBSD as well for an upcoming Debian related transition. I have nothing against systemd as such, this is pure selfishness. I an happy to let others do the debugging...
  • toolz 12y ago
    You're moving to openbsd so you'll have a more hands off system? Good luck with that.
    • lmm 12y ago
      One of my favourite things about FreeBSD is that it acknowledges that updating will always have edge cases you don't think of. So there's a text file that you read as part of the update workflow, and when specific steps are necessary, you follow them. I've never had an upgrade go wrong with FreeBSD, which is more than I can say for any flavour of Linux.
      • Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd 12y ago
        For what it's worth, Gentoo has a similar system. Packages can show a message when they are installed (including updates) and for system-wide changes the package manager will tell you to to read 'eselect news'.
        • ashark 12y ago
          I loved Gentoo's package management system. I managed to break my system more with Gentoo than any other distro, but that wasn't the package manager's fault—mostly mine and/or package maintainers. I wish it'd gone as mainstream as dpkg and rpm—I prefer widely-used distros these days because I like being able to google any problem and find an answer (I'm well past the days where I found managing my OS to be anything resembling fun) but I miss Portage. I miss OpenRC, for that matter. Using that is the only time I've felt something like contentment while managing init.
    • CHY872 12y ago
• coldtea 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. Yeah, they should give it a few decades of thought... And maybe check out if this ANSI C thing is worth supporting over plain ole K&R C.
  • michaelcampbell 12y ago
    "...one fool says `this is old, and therefore good`; the other says `this is new, and therefore better`..."
    • coldtea 12y ago
      Only neither is new. One is several decades old and broken, the second is newer but still almost a decade old, and we know it does work and what it fixes...
• pjmlp 12y ago
  I guess you know *BSD might eventually adopt something similar.
  • jethro_tell 12y ago
    This is the great part, because the will probably have API compatibility for a lot of the little parts.(like logind) That means we will not have a mono culture going forward.
    • vezzy-fnord 12y ago
      Where did you get that idea? The BSD people (just FreeBSD, mostly iXsystems employees) are simply working on a port of OS X's launchd, which has no similar session/seat management component as logind, from what I know.
      • EmanueleAina 12y ago
        At least OpenBSD had a GSoC to investigate a logind replacement: http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/gsoc2014.html#systemd http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/gsoc2014.html#systemd