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posted by
janrinok
on Wednesday October 08 2014, @05:32PM
from the stoking-the-systemd-flame-war dept.
from the stoking-the-systemd-flame-war dept.
Systemd will have a console daemon, replacing the kernel console, to the applause of phoronix forums.
And of course, it will make even more impossible to use anything besides systemd with the Linux kernel, as a side effect, which seems even more to be the goal. Is there nothing that systemd will not eventually do?
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Systemd 217 will Include a Console Daemon
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Q: What do you have when you have a lawyer buried up to his neck in sand?
A: Not enough sand.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Arik on Wednesday October 08 2014, @05:57PM
Slackware has no systemd and is unlikely to ever change in that respect.
Gentoo has it as an option - it works just great without it.
And of course all the BSDs do without it as well.
LFS is a viable option as well, but dont make the mistake of thinking it's the only one. There are still several decent *nix OSes out there to choose from.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by CRCulver on Wednesday October 08 2014, @06:29PM
Over on today's ./ discussion, a Gentoo user claims that even on Gentoo, systemd has snuck its tendrils through so much desktop software that avoiding it is becoming a pain.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Arik on Wednesday October 08 2014, @06:54PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by tibman on Wednesday October 08 2014, @07:06PM
Agreed. Likely a user emerged something that has systemd as a dependency. It's very possible that someone didn't realize that installing a desktop environment would kill their existing logging/init/whatever else.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @11:44PM
It's not "whatever else". It's "everything else" when it comes to systemd.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Wednesday October 08 2014, @06:59PM
"desktop software"
My advice, avoid desktop software.
My desktop environment is chromium browser, konsole (although I'm open to anything else that speaks UTF-8 fluently), occasional VNC, and emacs. And xmonad's virt desktops.
I checked out gnome to see its desktop website about 20 seconds ago, "Tomboy is a note-taking application.". So how does it compare to emacs org mode and evernote in my web browser? I'm guessing not very well.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by pnkwarhall on Wednesday October 08 2014, @07:44PM
"Tomboy is a note-taking application"
LOL - I'm pretty sure that's a literal quote from an "Intro to Gnome"-type tutorial, but it could easily be taken for parody of the TONS of useless OSS out there. Someone earlier in the comments was modd'd insightful for
The fact that venerable software components have long standing vulnerabilities is hardly an argument for not creating new more modern software.
...I have problems understanding what that sentence means, especially in the context it's in, but it seems to me that almost nobody needs an excuse for writing new software. From what I can tell (IANA software engineer), almost everyone would prefer to write a new "app" as opposed to fix or maintain an old one. And it's created a useless glut of "Tomboys".
Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @08:07PM
Tomboy, [wikipedia.org] a notorious application best known for its pulling of Mono into numerous distributions of GNU/Linux [techrights.org]
how does it compare to emacs org mode and evernote in my web browser? I'm guessing not very well
That about covers it--if you don't include the another-systemd-before-systemd aspect.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday October 09 2014, @08:02AM
Tomboy using Mono may be bad, but the concept as such is good. It basically is a private Wiki for your desktop (and unlike real Wiki doesn't force you to run a web server to use it).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @09:48AM
https://live.gnome.org/Gnote [gnome.org], A port of Tomboy to C++
(Score: 3, Interesting) by CRCulver on Wednesday October 08 2014, @08:49PM
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 08 2014, @08:56PM
Don't edit like most people, or use online photo editing like most of the social services offer for free, or edit on the phone that took the pix, or use 3rd party online photo editing.
Or, like I have implied, someone who does prepress (is gimp able to do 24 bit color prepress yet, that was a big debate years ago) might have photoshop as their "one application".
Perhaps 0.001% of the population will be power users using many apps. They'll deal with it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @09:14AM
Sorry, if there's one thing worse than systemd, it's replacing local applications with the cloud.
I keep my photos on my local hard disk, thank you very much.
(Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Wednesday October 08 2014, @08:57PM
Odd...I keep hearing this.
I've been using GIMP under Gentoo forever, currently 2.8.10, with no systemd, and I didn't even have to override any USE flags to do so.
(Score: 4, Informative) by CRCulver on Wednesday October 08 2014, @09:01PM
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday October 08 2014, @09:27PM
It's crap like this that explains why no one believes a word the systemd cabal spouts anymore.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Marand on Thursday October 09 2014, @12:35AM
It's a phantom dependency inserted in Debian - GIMP works fine on systems where systemd isnt even an option.
It's not even that. It's a recommendation to install dbus, which will install a library that allows dbus to interact with systemd. systemd itself doesn't install just because you have gimp installed. The people claiming it does don't know what they're talking about. I'm using Debian's testing repository and gimp is not inextricably tied to systemd as people keep claiming.
For what it's worth, I've been using Debian since 2000, and Debian testing as a pseudo rolling-release distro since around 2004. And, unlike other people here, I actually understand the difference between a "Recommends" line and a "Depends" line in apt.
Systemd is an annoying, system-consuming pile of crap from an obnoxious, shoddy programmer. I don't want it any more than the other people complaining. However, I've gotten sick of the "gimp needs systemd" argument because it's just giving the systemd advocates another excuse to shrug off any complaints. All the gimp argument does is let people say "oh look, those silly anti-systemd people keep saying gimp requires systemd. They're idiots we can ignore them"
udev being folded into systemd is a problem. Folding a console into systemd is a problem. Binary-only logfiles that randomly corrupt and it's considered EWONTFIX is a problem. The fact that systemd has an all-or-nothing monolithic design that means users and devs can't just use the parts they want without having to get all the extra crap. Poettering getting directly involved in the decision-making behind many major parts of the desktop stack and then using that as a way to force systemd dependencies on the other components is a problem. Plenty of other problems, too.
But why complain about that? Let's just have everybody on SN talk about how "gimp requires systemd" and undermine the valid arguments. I wouldn't be surprised at this point if I were to find out that the people seeding the discussions with that are actually pro-systemd and trying to undermine the whole argument.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Thursday October 09 2014, @01:27AM
I havent used a .deb distribution in several years, I dont remember the answer to that, and even if I did it would be out of date, so tell me, is that the default and/or recommended configuration for apt-get install to drag in anything recommended as well?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Marand on Thursday October 09 2014, @01:58AM
I believe the default is to install recommends (I've had it turned off for years, but it most likely still is), but even then, it isn't installing systemd. It's just installing a library so that dbus can work with systemd when present, in the same way that gimp installs libs that allow interacting with dbus when present, but those libs, likewise, don't require dbus itself.
The actual systemd package is named "systemd", and contains all the systemd stuff. "systemd-sysv" is the package that switches the init, and "systemd-shim" is the one that helps systemd work with non-systemd inits. None of these install when installing gimp, even if you keep the default of auto-installing recommended packages.
So, yes, the complaint is still frivolous. Complaining about gimp using libdbus and dbus using libsystemd-login0 is about as silly as complaining that gimp installs libexif12 to interact with EXIF data in images if present. It's not mandating that you use EXIF data, it's just taking advantage of it if present. Or, a better example: gimp has liblcms1 (a colour management library) as a dependency, but that doesn't mean that you have to have a colour-managed display and the other parts of littleCMS installed to use gimp. Gimp just has the libs needed to use it if it's there.
I didn't go into the libsystemd-login0 vs systemd difference in the reply to you because I'd covered it in another reply nearby, but the explanation comment is here [soylentnews.org] if you're curious. Explains how to see the dependency tree both with and without recommendations, as well as what dbus is actually bringing in. And it's not systemd.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @10:56PM
Does not. Gimp requires libdbus, which _recommends_ dbus, which requires libsystemd.
Though debian by default will offer to install recommended packages, it seems one can still avoid systemd and have gimp.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Marand on Thursday October 09 2014, @12:23AM
On Debian, GIMP requires dbus, and dbus requires systemd. Furthermore, GIMP requires libgegl, and on Debian that has a pulseaudio dependency (another Lennart package many would like to avoid).
No, gimp does not require dbus, and I wish people would quit up-modding this shit when it's completely false. One of the libs gimp uses recommends dbus be installed, but it's not a dependency. Turn off auto-install of "recommended" packages and dbus won't pull in automatically.
Furthermore, dbus isn't installing systemd either. It's installing libsystemd-login0, which is a library that, as the debian package states, "provides an interface for the systemd-logind service". It's not actually systemd, and it doesn't install systemd itself.
You can verify this easily enough in Debian with apt-rdepends. By default it only follows Depends,PreDepends, so apt-rdepends gimp won't have anything that touches systemd listed. If you want to find the systemd lib, you have to use
apt-rdepends --follow Depends,PreDepends,Recommends --show Depends,PreDepends,Recommends gimp. By following recommendations you can get a systemd lib, but it still doesn't install systemd itself.
Installing gimp doesn't magically trash your init, and people need to stop claiming this bullshit. The people claiming it are wrong and need to either do some fact-checking, stop making shit up, or pick up a better understanding of how their systems work.
I don't like systemd, I don't want to use it, and I find it annoying that I have to actively avoid it in Debian. I fully support people complaining about it and fighting for alternatives. However, there are plenty of good reasons to complain about sytemd without trotting out this terrible argument! Use them instead!
(Score: 2) by CRCulver on Thursday October 09 2014, @09:07AM
libsystemd-login0 and libsystem0 are not simply unobjectionable binding code that Debian brought. They is developed by Poettering and considered part of systemd. "systemd" is Debian's upstream name for these libraries, they are all drawn from Poettering's project. That you fail to note this makes one wonder what exactly your agenda is.
When people say they don't want systemd, they aren't just talking about running systemd as their init system. People don't want any of the systemd code installed on their computers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Marand on Thursday October 09 2014, @10:46AM
That you fail to note this makes one wonder what exactly your agenda is.
The only "agenda" I have is I'm sick of seeing you, VLM, and some others throwing out that same ridiculous, problematic, factually incorrect gimp example. It's foolish, wrong, and you're just undermining far better arguments against systemd by focusing on something that isn't even accurate.
Also, that little snipe at my character is an insulting and petty way to try discrediting my comments. You can easily dig through my posting history and see that I'm not exactly giving glowing praise to pulseaudio, systemd, Sievers, or Poettering in anything I say. Furthermore, it's telling that you couldn't refute my statements and had to immediately go for the sleazy insinuations instead.
When people say they don't want systemd, they aren't just talking about running systemd as their init system. People don't want any of the systemd code installed on their computers.
Really? I haven't seen people complain about various libs that are largely useless without the software they interface with present. The complaints I've seen have been about systemd's init, logging, login services, udev folding into systemd, the hard dependency of polkit and upower, feature creep, etc.
Those are all issues with systemd the service, not some interface libs. If you're not willing to accept the presence of some random libs like that, then you really shouldn't be using a precompiled distro at all. Sounds more like Linux from Scratch is where you need to be, because with a distro that gives precompiled software, you're inevitably going to get some libs for crap you don't really need to support software or hardware you don't even have for the sake of greater compatibility.
This isn't a war over some interface libs. There's plenty of unnecessary libs already floating around every Debian system for the purpose of supporting software that not everyone uses. For example, I've had libs for any number of sound servers on my system (arts, esd, pulse, jack) over the years despite using ALSA directly. It's normal for these distros and doesn't hurt anything. Systemd's problems lie elsewhere.
The point, which you haven't managed to refute, still stands. Gimp isn't underhandedly installing pulseaudio and systemd, even if you're auto-installing recommends like a newbie. Gimp isn't causing your Debian system to change inits and destroying your plaintext logging.
Now, if you replaced "Gimp" in these arguments with "Network Manager", you'd have a valid argument. Network Manager depends on policykit-1, which I believe does end up with a direct requirement for systemd. So does upower and udisks2. So, you can find a slew of stuff to complain about with apt-rdepends --reverse and any of those three (policykit-1, udisks2, or upower). Udisks2 is especially problematic because a lot of desktop environment bits are starting to expect it for removable storage management.
Basically, what I'm saying is systemd has plenty of problems without repeating one horribly flawed, incorrect assertion about gimp. I've even explained how to find other problems to point out. Though you do have to watch for some packages that have OR dependencies, like lighttpd, which depends on systemd | lsb-base, so it lists as a systemd dependent but doesn't actually require systemd. (as shown with apt-cache show lighttpd | grep Depends)
I wish you and anybody else luck advocating against systemd, I really do. I don't want it to win. Even when I've corrected people, I've tried providing suggestions and other arguments. I just don't think that incorrect, bullshit assertions are the way to go about fighting it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @11:56AM
I don't think his example is "ridiculous, problematic, factually incorrect" or whatever else you want to refer to it as.
If I'm using Debian, and I type "sudo apt-get install gimp" and I also get systemd installed, which basically trashes my system, I don't care if it's an optional dependency, or a recommended dependency, or a "phantom" dependency, or whatever you want to refer to it as. The normal act of installing GIMP should never bring in systemd.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Thursday October 09 2014, @12:30PM
If I'm using Debian, and I type "sudo apt-get install gimp" and I also get systemd installed, which basically trashes my system, I don't care if it's an optional dependency, or a recommended dependency, or a "phantom" dependency, or whatever you want to refer to it as. The normal act of installing GIMP should never bring in systemd.
That's the point. It doesn't bring in systemd and it doesn't trash your system. Installing gimp like that just gives you an interface lib for it along with a bunch of other similar libs like the ones for littlecms, exif data, compression, etc. There are no actual dependencies on systemd there, so you'll still be systemd free.
This is still accurate based on the dependencies in the testing repo of Debian as of 24 hours ago. Testing follows unstable closely except during a freeze, so it should be accurate for unstable, too. The people saying otherwise don't know what they're talking about, either repeating what others said or confusing an interface lib with the actual systemd software and making incorrect assumptions.
For contrast, installing network-manager, I believe, does force you to use systemd because of policykit requiring it, so network manager would be an example of the hostile behaviour that gimp is being incorrectly blamed for doing.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Thursday October 09 2014, @05:45AM
Furthermore, GIMP requires libgegl, and on Debian that has a pulseaudio dependency (another Lennart package many would like to avoid).
I should have addressed this in the previous post, but this statement is even more absurd than the systemd "dependency" claim I rebutted in the other comment. Gimp has a dependency on libgegl, which depends on libsdl, which in turn has a dependency on libpulse0. Again, this isn't requiring pulseaudio be installed, it's just a lib that's available so that, if a program uses the audio part of SDL -- remember, SDL is more than just graphics -- it can use the pulse sound server if it's present.
It does the same thing for ALSA, too: libsdl also has a dependency on libasound2, which is basically the ALSA equivalent of libpulse0. Are you going to imply that gimp is forcing ALSA on everybody, too? It doesn't, it just uses the library so that it can use ALSA for sound if needed, same way it uses libpulse0 to use pulseaudio on systems that use that.
Where do you people come up with this insanity? Even if you don't know how to use apt-rdepends or read packages.debian.org, you should be able to verify that the gimp/pulse dependency claim is false just by trying to remove pulseaudio and seeing that it doesn't attempt to uninstall gimp.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @12:01PM
Again, this isn't requiring pulseaudio be installed, it's just a lib that's available so that, if a program uses the audio part of SDL -- remember, SDL is more than just graphics -- it can use the pulse sound server if it's present.
How the fuck can you say that isn't a dependency? If A can use B then A depends on B. Now if A can use C instead of B then A may not have a strict dependency on B, but it's still a dependency between A and B nonetheless!
(Score: 2) by Marand on Thursday October 09 2014, @12:51PM
Because it isn't forcing installation of pulseaudio itself, and functions without it. I can use gimp and I don't have pulseaudio installed, so how is pulse a dependency? If it were one I'd have broken sound on my desktop instead of functioning alsa sound (I've always had problems with pulse and my around card so I don't use it )
Can use doesn't imply must use, and no part of the dependency chain even tries to install pulse. You're trying to redefine dependency when it has a specific meaning in this context. A library being able to communicate with pulse is not a dependency on pulse in the context of Debian package dependencies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @09:55PM
Like I said, if the default action of Debian is to treat systemd as a dependency when installing GIMP, then for all intents and purposes it is a dependency. I know it may not be absolutely required. But that doesn't matter in practice. If I go to install GIMP, and systemd also gets pulled it, it's a dependency as far as I'm concerned. I don't want to waste my time fiddling with the package system's config to work around this. I'm using the package system in the first place because it should be saving me time and cutting down my effort! If the packaging system says that systemd is a dependency of GIMP by default, then as far as I'm concerned it is a dependency.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Thursday October 09 2014, @10:11PM
Like I said, if the default action of Debian is to treat systemd as a dependency when installing GIMP,
It isn't.
if I go to install GIMP, and systemd also gets pulled it
It doesn't.
If the packaging system says that systemd is a dependency of GIMP by default
Again, it doesn't. The people saying otherwise are provably wrong.
Hopefully that's clear enough for you. I thought I had made that clear already, but this time I'm leaving out the technical parts so there is no room for confusion. Refer to other posts if more detail is needed; I've already explained at length what the situation really is like.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday October 08 2014, @08:58PM
How does the BSD distributions deal with that?
(Score: 3, Informative) by digitalaudiorock on Wednesday October 08 2014, @08:53PM
Diehard Gentoo user here. That's only true if you insist on using things that require it, like the newer Gnome etc. Any software that requires it is basically against my religion and I don't use it. Problem solved.
I've been using fluxbox for my desktop for many years. I've found suitable replacements for any Gnome related programs I was using.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by curunir_wolf on Wednesday October 08 2014, @08:56PM
There's a pretty interesting discussion on systemd, that started about the "Boycott systemd" website, over on the Gentoo AMD64 mailing list [gmane.org]. There are clearly 2 very divided camps over the issue, and no one is swaying anyone either way.
I am a crackpot
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @11:50PM
Oh, people are getting swayed. They're just getting swayed totally away from Linux, and into the FreeBSD camp. This is especially so for those running Debian. They're already mostly sysadmins, developers, and other experienced Linux and UNIX users. They actually find FreeBSD superior in a lot of ways. One of the most significant is that it likely will never get infected with systemd.
(Score: 2) by cykros on Wednesday October 08 2014, @07:12PM
Maybe we can use systemd to rally enough developers together to finally bring GNU Hurd to a usable state? Pretty please? Wouldn't mind seeing Minix get a little more viable as well...
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday October 08 2014, @08:24PM
Because GNU Hurd makes dynamic configuration an integral part of the operating system and thus no need ever for systemd?
(Score: 4, Funny) by forsythe on Wednesday October 08 2014, @08:38PM
Wouldn't mind seeing Minix get a little more viable as well...
A while back, someone had the same idea. AST wasn't too thrilled with the idea, so apparently the guy started his own project instead.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 12 2014, @03:04PM
It would make more sense just to fork the Linux kernel, if that was what is really necessary. That or switch to a BSD. The really hard part in making HURD a realistic alternative to Linux is the hardware support.