On 14/10/14 22:55, Chris Samuel wrote:
I'm curious after the recent storm about systemd to find out how many people have actually tried to use it?
Have been a user since version 44 was available in Debian for my servers, and on my desktops since I switched to Fedora 17. As a user with nowhere near as much technical expertise as others on this list, systemd has been nothing but awesome to me.
From a sysadmin perspective it makes my life easier by bringing service control up to (and beyond) the standard of Windows, which has been able to supervise processes since, gosh, I only started counting in Windows 2000.
From both a sysadmin and a user perspective, unit files are easier to write and more robust than writing init scripts. The syntax is not as friendly as upstart, but this is a minor detail.
From a user perspective, my system boots insanely quickly, no longer hangs on shutdown like upstart does (this is a known bug that is also linked to filesystem corruption -- can't be bothered finding the source for this, but is an open bug on Launchpad), and doesn't interfere with muscle memory by still being able to do "service foo restart".
From a sysadmin perspective killing off pesky child processes is SO last century. You may well argue that every instance where child processes linger when the parent dies is a bug in the application. Well, good luck fixing every one. I'll see you next millennium. In the meantime, I'm enjoying getting actual work done.
I find a good analogy for the way cgroups improves management is thinking about the ways in which virtualisation also improves management. If you people are going to rip out systemd and send me back to sysvinit because of technical reasons that I am not capable of arguing against, you are going to have to find a way to replicate all these useful features that I'm ACTUALLY using with an easy to learn config format (easier than configuring most things out there!) and even easier command line tools out of the box in any major distro. It's a classic case of technical purists telling the users what they should want, rather than actually giving users what they want. Before systemd came along I longed for the kind of stuff it could do! The alternatives I've seen talked about in the past week just don't cut the mustard in my book, as both a sysadmin and a user. Anything other than systemd is unacceptable in my view of the future.