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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
bydrinkypoo ( 153816 ) writes:
Poettering will also continue to remain deeply involved in the systemd ecosystem.
I therefore trust that it will continue to be shit.
bytwinirondrives ( 10502753 ) writes:
for people hacking together their own systems I'd admit that systemd does nothing for that. But organizational level mass deployed systems are pretty much barred from linux without something filling that role. then I think systemd was an idea put forward around the same time io_uring was which maybe possibly was the beginning of a compliant solution filling the systemd role. my opinion is io_uring actually increased the attack surface of linux systems. would that have been different if systemd never existe
byShaitan ( 22585 ) writes:
Overrated. Prior to systemd Linux administrators famously admin'd thousands of systems vs tens in the windows world. That text/file/directory-based system combined with all the text-mangling power tools in linux, the shell, and perl... nothing compares.
It actually becomes much easier to work with configuration management tools when they are managing the state of text files as the Linux gods intended.
bydskoll ( 99328 ) writes:
Systemd units are plain text files, you know.
I honestly don't understand the visceral hate for systemd. I've been using UNIX since 1989 and Linux since 1994, so I have plenty of experience with old ways of doing things.
Systemd, at least in my experience, just works and writing systemd unit files is easier than writing sysvinit scripts. So when Debian switched to it, it was fine. I adapted.
bydrinkypoo ( 153816 ) writes:
I honestly don't understand the visceral hate for systemd.
It is the antithesis of the Unix way. This has been argued back and forth all along, and if you don't agree I won't try to convince you here.
Systemd, at least in my experience, just works and writing systemd unit files is easier than writing sysvinit scripts. So when Debian switched to it, it was fine. I adapted.
The problem with systemd and unit scripts is that they cannot do all the things that a script can do, so you often wind up using a script anyway. In that case you have really not made things any simpler than the usual case. Meanwhile you've added a whole lot of complexity which is largely unnecessary, some of which is utterly dependent on other parts so it is difficult
bydskoll ( 99328 ) writes:
Appealing to "the UNIX way" is just silly. UNIX has been around for over 50 years, and it evolves as people figure out better ways to do things.
The problem with systemd and unit scripts is that they cannot do all the things that a script can do, so you often wind up using a script anyway.
I would say: very rarely, not often. Looking at the units on my machine, none of them uses an auxiliary script to start or stop a service.
byShaitan ( 22585 ) writes:
"Appealing to "the UNIX way" is just silly"
No, it's the Unix philosophy of small purpose built tools combined rather than large monolithic integrated solutions and that never changes. But you tipped your hand, you began as a proprietary unix guy and they use monolithic systemd-like chunks all over the place.
"it evolves as people figure out better ways"
The philosophy doesn't, the tools do, but systemd doesn't bring better ways to do things just one built with Microsoft's big monolithic one size fits all phil
bydskoll ( 99328 ) writes:
I never began as a "proprietary UNIX guy" for two reasons; one is that I'm not a guy and second is I used SunOS and Solaris mostly as a student and a little bit on the job, and this was back in the day before SMF, etc. when the system was much more BSD-like.
The problem with appealing to "the UNIX way" is that nobody really knows what that is, beyond a few vague generalities. Systemd itself is not one monolithic program, by the way. It consists of 38 small purpose-built executables (on Debian 13, anyway)
byShaitan ( 22585 ) writes:
"I never began as a "proprietary UNIX guy" for two reasons; one is that I'm not a guy"
Everyone is a "guy" dude. You aren't special man.
"The problem with appealing to "the UNIX way" is that nobody really knows what that is, beyond a few vague generalities."
It's a general concept.
"It consists of 38 small purpose-built executables"
All of which are part of ONE monolithic solution to many unrelated problems. Exchange/Outlook/Office consists of many executables and yet is literally the most famous Microsoft monol
bydskoll ( 99328 ) writes:
Everyone is a "guy" dude. You aren't special man.
In case it's not obvious, about 50% of people are not "guys". I guess sysvinit folks are not great at seeing cases outside their own experience. :)
Change just for the sake of change isn't a good thing.
Yes, I agree. However, on balance, I think systemd (or something like it) isa good change for a number of reasons I've outlined in other posts:
1. Easy ability to do dependency management.
2. Ability to start services in parallel (which flows from 1).
3. Remove the necessity for every service to write its own daemonization code; you can just let systemd do it for you.
4. Standard way to run services as a non-root user
5. Standard way to use newer Linux features like cgroups and namespaces.
6. Standard commands for monitoring and controlling the status of a service.
All of those things can be (and probably have been) implemented in sysvinit environments, but usually as hacks. systemd at least standardizes the procedures and reduces the amount of hacky sysvinit code support required.
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bytender-matser ( 938909 ) writes:
Remove the necessity for every service to write its own daemonization code;
That's a total non-issue. The entire "daemonization code" is just 2 syscalls: fork(2) + setsid(2) and using syslog(3) instead of stderr for printing error messages.
Other stuff like redirecting stdin/out/err to /dev/null or chdir / is usually more trouble than it's worth (for instance, I'm always redirecting the std fds from a non-connected socket instead of /dev/null -- in order to have accidental read/write FAIL instead of silently succeeding and hiding real issues with the code).
Adapting to the canned "solutions" offered by systemd / daemontools / whatever is instead much more complicated and more limiting in what you can do. All that without any benefit (besides better fitting into someone else's worldview and OCD fixations).
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bydskoll ( 99328 ) writes:
OK, so you disagree with my point 3. How about the other 5 points?
bydrinkypoo ( 153816 ) writes:
1. Easy ability to do dependency management.
Debian has a script or script library I believe originally from the lsb which does this easily from some boilerplate at the top of the init script. That's how update-rc.d works, but it's also used to make init scripts require that other scripts have started successfully.
2. Ability to start services in parallel (which flows from 1).
startpar
3. Remove the necessity for every service to write its own daemonization code; you can just let systemd do it for you.
daemontools, inetd...
4. Standard way to run services as a non-root user
Funny thing about standards.
5. Standard way to use newer Linux features like cgroups and namespaces.
There already were standard ways to do this in the shell, and therefore in init scripts. They are even already used.
6. Standard commands for monitoring and controlling the status of a service.
That's always been a part of init scripts.
All of those things can be (and probably have been) implemented in sysvinit environments, but usually as hacks.
All of those things are av
byBarsteward ( 969998 ) writes:
You'll never get this anti-systemd mob to change their minds, you can still see after all this time they think all the small purpose optional executables are mandatory and the nonsense of "monolith" (linux itself is a monolith and they don't mind that). It works well for large organisations, i'd guess they just don't want to learn new tricks and think the old way makes them elitist techies and hopefully keeps them in a job.
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