Trying to very quickly appease your request. On 10/10/2014 12:19 AM, Erik Christiansen wrote:
a) What should we read if the "horror stories" are hidden/moderated or whatever? There won't be any there then, will there?
Google is often your friend, there are still many systemd threads on DU list -- and systemd has been around long enough for much information to be found, both positive and negative, even if the weight is strongly on the negative side.
b) If there is any attribute of systemd which is genuinely horrible, then do you think that you have the capacity to render a rational description of how to replicate the abomination?
Not being able to look through simple plain text log files is very significant. A failure of any single part of systemd could easily mean you have an non-bootable system. Aren't those two things significant enough? systemd is encroaching on far too many aspects of system operation and the developer team for systemd is reportedly just two people, one of which has great interest in Red Hat. Add to the fact that gnome depends on systemd and Debian is moving back to gnome desktop default and you know where this is all heading. It looks like it's time to escape Debian -- or at least in the not too distant future.
c) Since systemd is a sysV init substitute, it ought to be manageable to build debian with the substitution reversed, given the hordes who ostensibly support your cause. If none of them will lift a finger to help the cause, then they are passengers, with the passenger's right to get off the bus if it isn't going their way.
There is madness, one of the posts that I linked to previously expressed the concerns of a Linux kernel developer with all his difficulties in using systemd, read that and then conclude that systemd is ready for the masses .... then I'll say you are deluded.
d) Is changing to another distro, which does not use systemd, likely to prove fatal, or even make your hair fall out? And if the distros all change to systemd, then how "horrible" can it really be?
The question is why are [most] going that way? Not all distros are, there are still exceptions as highlighted in the distrowatch newsletter that I linked to. A real, but short term alternative is to move to Debian kFreeBSD, but even that is mentioned on the list as a possible dead end in the not too distant future due to support issues -- those issues will be magnified if maintainers need to keep non systemd operational for the kFreeBSD builds; you can see it dropping off very quickly. That leaves going full on to FreeBSD or some other BSD alternative to escape the problems and dangers of systemd. Oh and with Debian, if you aren't running at least stable in Wheezy, then you better have an x86 based machine with squeeze-lts or you won't get updates .... even those updates with squeeze-lts are done by a team that doesn't include Debian Security -- not saying that team is not good, but it's more of a risk than running Wheezy and Jessie isn't ready yet. There may be Wheezy-lts, but only time will tell on that. The days of having a non systemd Debian distro are really quite numbered unless DDs start to understand the risks and problems and get a GR through to remove the track to systemd ASAP. If you want to get newer than Wheezy, well you'll have Jessie [upcoming stable version to replace Wheezy] with the new default desktop being gnome (re-instated) and you know who mostly maintains gnome [Red Hat] and with gnome, you almost definitely must have systemd for it to work with Debian. If you don't want gnome and don't want systemd, then you will have choices in Jessie by the look of it, but who knows if the any later releases will remove a choice to run a non systemd system -- we can see it coming, time to jump off the band wagon or plan to do so before it is too late and you end up running a completely unsupported OS. That is, unless a GR gets up and stops this disaster train from going forward with Debian. Old stable in plain squeeze is no longer supported, next best is squeeze-lts unless you can upgrade to Wheezy.
Of the various vague attempts to be scary, the dire warnings of "binary logs" thus far seem to be the most solidly irritating potentiality. But how slow can the log decoder possibly be? And then the log is text, innit?
If you have an non-bootable system and then you need to rely on a Live boot to try and discover the issues, then time is of the essence and parsing binary log files, even with good tools is going to be a problem. Your downtime is quite likely going to be significantly longer if you can't find the right log file extracted from the binary logs to give you the answers you need to resolve the issues at hand.
It's spring. Plant a pumpkin. Make a scary mask. It'll enhance your sales pitch 500% - minimum.
Haha. Take this seriously, if all Linux distros go systemd, it will be like a black box to many and whilst it might work well overall, there will be more than enough troubles to seriously make it not worth the effort, let alone the risk of running systemd on production systems. If your use is just as a hobby, then this is all a moot consideration, however if you rely on systems for DNS, mail, web and/or other services, then you are putting your systems at too much risk with systemd -- it is not worth that risk in my view, given all that I've read about the issues and problems. If you want to profit from consulting services, then going systemd might be a good income stream for you, that is if your clients can afford the high cost of maintenance due to systemd installation and the real potential problems. Today, it's bad enough trying to get Xen working on some machines, that's without the added burden of systemd ... and yes, it is much more added burden and much more risk that things won't work for one reason or another and you are relying on one large binary that wants to handle everything critical to the system. A.