On Thu, Sep 29, 2016 at 06:14:49PM +1000, russell@coker.com.au wrote:
On Thursday, 29 September 2016 3:20:37 PM AEST Paul van den Bergen via luv-main wrote:
I'm going to be critical here - it is rare that you have personal choice over the tools your system uses.
i haven't found it to be that rare. but then, i've always preferred jobs where i'm going to use (or can choose to use) the tools I like to use...or, even better, use my preferred tools and learn some new good ones.
Do the job in front of you. If that means you support windows ME as a security portal(!), that's what you do... at least until you find a better job.
or if your bosses are that stupid to suggest using Win ME for a task like that and you can't talk them out of it (up to and including asking them to acknowledge in writing that you've advised against it and that they accept full responsibility for the consequences of their decision), you can quit and leave them to their self-inflicted demise.
We have choices, but choices have to be backed by work - which is the hard part.
People who have chosen systemd have spent a lot of time making it work better and solving some real problems that other init systems have had for many years. People who want to choose SysVInit have spent a lot of time flaming people who write the code.
it's nowhere near as simple as that. there are loons on both sides of the pro- and anti- systemd debate. AFAICT, the anti-systemd loons tend to be nastier (although the pro-systemd loons aren't blameless either), while the pro-systemd loons seem to be more stupid, as well as ignorant ignorant about anything but solitary, single user desktop and laptop systems....but i haven't paid much attention to the debate for ages, i just don't care what other people want to use, as long as they don't try to force their choices on me. AFAICT, the majority of the anti-systemd side (the non-loons) think that systemd as an init system and even as a control groups manager (with or without its container stuff) is fine or even good. the objection to systemd from most people has nothing to do with that. The objection is about all the other stuff that system tries to do (and generally does a crappy, half-arsed job of). it's a hostile takeover of functionality that other programs do better, and is reminiscent of microsoft's "embrace and extend" practice and policy for destroying competition. Closely tied to that is the related objection of how tightly integrated all those extra things are - you can't easily mix and match the best tools for a particular job (dns, cron, logging, device control, etc). If you're relying on distro packages, and you're lucky (as in debian), the distro doesn't enable all the extras by default and provides decent workaround (like defaulting journald to use log to syslog. personally, i'd rather not have journald running at all, but that's at least a workable compromise). if you're not lucky, you either take all of systemd or compile your own without the stuff you don't want (losing benefit of distro upgrades for systemd), or you switch to something else like openrc (and then find you have to run most of systemd anyway because lots of stuff has unwarranted and unreasonable dependencies on it) anyway, systemd's borging of every function it possibly can will inevitably lead to the death of innovation in linux and bring about a software monoculture (nothing will be able to compete with it because in order to do so, a competitor will have to replicate and replace every thing it does, not just be better at one or two things). and moncultures are *always* unhealthy. In short, the price for systemd's one or two nice (but not unique) features is far too high. that's my position on systemd anyway, and it seems not an uncommon one. BTW, i'm no huge fan of sysvinit, but it works well enough (it's certainly not that bad that it requires replacement by something that doesn't know where it should stop - especially when there are other alternatives that don't try to take over everything and don't actively stifle competition), doesn't try to do extra crap that an init system has no business doing, and I don't find shell scripts at all scary - that bogeyman is even more laughable than systemd's 'it boots really fast "feature"' (but not noticable faster than anything else when you take into account the fact that most of the boot time is BIOS and adaptor card ROMs. you also need to not count the annoying 90 second to 5 minute delays while it tries to mount non-existent filesystems or connect to non-existent networks etc - e.g. i had to wait over 5 minutes today for systemd on my laptop to give up on trying to connect to a network when it wasn't even plugged in to one and wifi was deliberately disabled - and if there is actually some way to tell it to give up and move on, it's certainly not obvious). personally, i think openrc would have been a better choice than systemd for debian (and other distros too). rough feature parity with systemd (some pluses, some minuses - overall, roughly equivalent) for init functions, without the other unwanted "features". Not counting my crappy little laptop which I don't use much, I only run systemd on one of my own systems. I'm resigned to the fact that i'll probably have no choice but to switch to it on all of them eventually, but i'm in no hurry to do so. if i'm really lucky, maybe something else will come along to displace it before it completes its stranglehold on the linux ecosystem (unfortunately, probably not).
We had a "debate" about the relative merits of the various init systems on this list some time ago. It turned out that only one of the people who were criticising systemd had actually used it, and that person wasn't making the more extreme criticisms.
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2015/04/26/anti-systemd-people/
It seems that discussions of systemd attract the attention of horrible people. I felt compelled to write the above blog post after a blog post about technical issues related to systemd got a lot of hateful comments.
It's quite likely that I have contributed more patches for init systems than anyone else on this list. The attitude of SysVInit fans doesn't make me inclined to spend any more effort patching that init system.
what a coincidence. the attitude of the primary systemd developers doesn't inspire me with any confidence as to the quality or the future of the project, or their ability to avoid doing something disastrous (the kernel debug option issue and the attitude it highlighted that they expect everyone else to change to accomodate them, rather than them trying to fit in with what other, more important projects are doing is a good example of that). and the systemd loons and fan boys are at least as annoying as the anti-systemd loons (typically with the bonus smugness of "it works on my little laptop or desktop for my limited needs so it's good enough for everyone" as well as a fear of scripting, command lines, text config files, and all the other things things that make linux & unix a pleasure to work with) craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>