On Wed, Dec 25, 2013 at 09:44:39AM +1100, Jason White wrote:
Matthew Cengia <mattcen@gmail.com> wrote:
I loathe the idea of systemd as much as the next guy, and basically agree with everything you said in your previous email,
I don't loathe the idea of systemd; in fact I think it's an interesting and useful piece of work, which is why it's seeing adoption from multiple distributions (Arch, Fedora, OpenSUSE, possibly others).
There have always been different init systems (System V, BSD, etc.) in use, and there's nothing to suggest the situation is about to change, hence I don't agree with the "monoculture" claims.
if it was *just* an init system, then it wouldn't be a monolithic monstrosity resulting in a mono-culture. but it's also absorbing syslogging, cron, udev, console and login handling, automount, and everything else in sight. an init system doesn't need to do all those things. it just needs to handle starting up daemons/services in the right order at boot time, and killing them later on shutdown or reboot. at the moment, each one of those system functions is provided by a separate, independent program - and each one can be replaced with an alternative or competing implementation *WITHOUT* fucking up the rest of the system. and we have *all* benefitted from that modularity over the years. I want to keep benefitting from that in the future. with systemd, that will no longer be possible. it's all or nothing. systemd's monolithic nature is antithetical to the unix "small tools" philosophy of "do one thing only but do it extremely well" that has served us all so well for decades. systemd absorbs everything and does a just barely good enough job for each of them before moving on to absorb something else (i.e. jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none) and the end result isn't anything like unix. it's not unix and it isn't linux any more, which is why i've taken to calling it lennartix.
It's true that the developers of systemd are keen to promote their work, but that's nothing new in software generally or free/open-source software specifically.
promotion is one thing. absorbing every low-level system service whether it's related to init or not is quite another. building unneccessary interdepencies that require end-users to switch to systemd is not mere "promotion", it's RH's version of the microsoft embrace and extend tactic, but in this case it's absorb and monopolise. having multiple corporations contribute to and co-operate and compete in linux development is a good thing. having one corporation end up controlling the low-level userland AND the desktop environments of all, or nearly-all, distros would be an absolute, unmitigated disaster.
Furthermore, I'm not suggesting to anyone that they should (or shouldn't) use systemd; that's an issue to consider, among others, in choosing a distribution.
it's more than just in choosing a distro - there are growing interdependencies between systemd and gnome (and, unfortunately, other desktop/window managers - even xfce). it's not quite there yet, but the future is clear: if you want to run gnome or most other desktops, you will have no choice but to run systemd (or, if you're lucky, put up with running your desktop environment in a second-rate "unsupported" systemd-less "degraded mode") when you *can't* choose to run something else - whether it's a syslogd or a crond or your desktop - because of these interdependencies, *THAT* is when you get a complete mono-culture. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>