Toby Corkindale <toby@dryft.net> writes:
On 14 October 2014 22:55, Chris Samuel <chris@csamuel.org> wrote:
I'm curious after the recent storm about systemd to find out how many people have actually tried to use it?
I've been running it for a while - it's a major component of CoreOS, and Ubuntu 14.04 has some support for it too. I have been quite bemused by all the commotion on this mailing list, because systemd has been completely fine.
I can't believe people want to stick with SysV init scripts.. they're horrible! Personally, I'd have been happier with Upstart, but anything is better than sysv.
upstart is fine when it works. When it goes wrong, it's a lot harder to debug than sysvinit -- ESPECIALLY when it goes wrong before you have writable persistent filesystem mounted, because upstart's debugging options are "everything scrolls offscreen before you can read it" and "put 'exec >/tmp/log 2>&1' at the top of your exec script". At least, that was the state as at 10.04 when booting off NFS triggered a cyclic deadlock between upstart and their "temporary workaround" mountall(8), which I notice they are STILL shipping. Which I "fixed" by replacing one of their scripts with a loop that emits an even every tenth of a second saying, basically, "mountall(8), please run mount -a". Sigh. If it was sysvinit, I could have added a "set -x" to the top of one or two scripts and found the problem a lot faster. Like that time CentOS 4 was taking FORTY MINUTES to boot, and I eventually traced it down to a /etc/sysconfig/ifcfg-eth0.~1~ being owned by an LDAP user, and since RHEL don't know how to write shell scripts, they were doing basically for i in $(ls /etc/sysconfig/) And ls of course tries to resolve the UID until libnss-ldap eventually times out. If the problem is "idiots can't write init scripts in sh", the answer is not to let the idiots write them a new XDGish notation, the answer is to pick someone from each distro and get them to go fix all the scripts.[0] Which I'd have done for Debian, except that would involve arguing with people and it's a lot easier to just selfishly fix the problem on only MY machines. [0] yes, I realize stuff like mysql and nsd3 are special and hinky. But that doesn't excuse stuff like webfs having badly-written scripts, and those can be fixed in ninety seconds. At least, as long as you don't have to worry about not bricking things in all all the different .preinst upgrade paths (which I would have to if I tried to fix them for everyone, not just me.)