posted by
martyb
on Wednesday May 04 2016, @04:51AM
from the all-meeting-notes-will-be-open-access...-in-binary dept.
from the all-meeting-notes-will-be-open-access...-in-binary dept.
Softpedia reports on the announcement by programmer Lennart Poettering of systemd.conf 2016, a conference around the topic of the systemd software.
According to the announcement, the event "will consist of two days of presentations, a one-day hackfest and one day of hands-on training sessions," happening from 28 September to 1 October at the betahaus coworking space.
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Berlin to Host Second systemd Conference
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(Score: 3, Funny) by sjames on Wednesday May 04 2016, @05:01AM
Do NOT attempt to reboot the city between Sep. 28 and Oct. 1!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @10:01PM
Don't worry.. there's always projectors, managed switches, USB microcontrollers, system firmware, network controllers, access points, loose flash memories, harddisk firmware all just desiring a self propagating flash upgrade! ;-)
And now we have a perfect playground with a lot of infection vectors... *yuammooma*
(Score: 2) by julian on Wednesday May 04 2016, @05:04AM
I can only imagine the IRL trolling and disruption that's going to happen at this. The nerdrage is strong on the anti-systemd side. TBH I don't understand the issue enough to have a strong opinion either way. I somewhat conceptually understand the arguments against systemd, but on the other hand all the modern Linux systems I use work just fine with it. If I was constantly having problems and every time I Google the issue I found "oh that's related to systemd" then I could understand hating it. My needs are probably simpler than most of the people who dislike it very strongly. I just need my NAS to serve files without interruption or attention for months at a time, and my workstation to boot and bring up a browser, mail client, and a terminal reliably.
(Score: 3, Funny) by frojack on Wednesday May 04 2016, @06:29AM
Well systemd hasn't improved anything, but hasn't really hurt anything that I've seen yet.
But jeeze, listening to that arrogant Poettering for two days would be adding injury to insult. They better install metal detectors at the doors.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @08:40AM
If I have audio issues, it is because something has installed PulseAudio.
If I have any other issues (e.g. with X, sudo, virtualisation, networking), it's something to do with systemd.
I *rarely* have issues with my machine that aren't caused by these two.
I'm sure that will just be dismissed (either people will think I'm lying, or just say it is anecdotal) but they are literally the bane of my existence on my personal machines.
I hated systemd long before I knew much about it or that it was written by Lennart (that was a "Well that explains a fucking lot" moment, for sure) because it completely broke my computer setup and continues to break it on most updates.
Will be moving to Gentoo soon (currently using Arch).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @02:12PM
Look into Void (voidlinux.eu) if you don't really want to spend the time compiling everything on Gentoo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @02:26PM
Looks interesting, I'll try it out (in a VM at first) :)
(Score: 1, Troll) by frojack on Wednesday May 04 2016, @03:55PM
The AC says:
because it completely broke my computer setup and continues to break it on most updates.
Could you perhaps tell us what distro you are using?
Its a matter of self preservation. We want to know what distro to avoid.
I use three different distros: Opensuse and Manjaro (arch) for the most part, and a couple Raspbian (debian) doing special tasks. A couple Ubuntu machines are also around the office.
All of them using systemd, and I haven't found a single issue when upgrading that was caused by systemd. In fact it has caused me just about no issues at all, other than a small learning curve.
So maybe some distros just suck at integrating systemd, and I would like to know which ones to stay away from to avoid your troubles.
If its not your distro, perhaps its the particular hardware mix that you have. I've got a few Dell rack mounts, some HP desk machines, and various vintages of laptops, and the aforementioned raspberry pi machines.
If not the distros and not the hardware, could it be one of the dread pebcak problems?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday May 04 2016, @05:23PM
Or! If you are having issues with CPU being eaten up, it's probably that worthless pos avahi-daemon. Yet another bloated Puttering invention. I wish that guy would quit Linux development. He could then move to where he belongs: web-dev world (aka hell.) They love bloated resource hogging disasters. He'd fit right in.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @05:49PM
He belongs in a DoD blacksite somewhere in Jordan.
(Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Wednesday May 04 2016, @06:04PM
Systemd has made booting preinstalled systems from a different partition than the one systemd is install into impossible. For me this makes it nearly unusable. Others appear to have other objections.
P.S.: You can get around that booting problem hand editing the /etc/fstab of the systems to recognize either the path to either the path to the old system or the revised UUID and then running update-grub. Perhaps this problem doesn't occur with lilo, I haven't checked.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday May 04 2016, @07:51PM
Yes, I've read something about that on the Opensuse list, but I've also seen there how to work around it with grub.
I have to admit that I avoid dual booting like the plague that it is and has always been, since long before systemd came around.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 05 2016, @05:08AM
UUIDs seems to be a sticking point with systemd. This because it parses the fstab and turn each entry into a unit. And unless you dump special x-systemd flags into those lines, systemd will treat all of them as vital (because that is how the servers wants it, m'kay) and therefore refuse to boot because of a unit failure.
Never mind that failing to boot results in the only access option being a barely functional command line that can't even be accessed over the network (because either you are a local admin or you use out of band management, m'kay).
(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday May 04 2016, @06:49AM
You should try to get it to mount btrfs in degraded mode sometime...
I can see where it could be OK (not really better, just OK) for desktop, but for a server in a lights out environment, it's a useless addition of failure modes waiting to happen.
(Score: 2) by julian on Wednesday May 04 2016, @07:11AM
I don't use btrfs. My understanding is that it's beta software so I wouldn't use it for that reason. And other systems work fine and are more proven. I've jumped around a lot to experiment but I've settled on ext4, and sometimes XFS. I have plans to someday switch to FreeBSD and ZFS for my NAS but I don't have the storage requirements to really make that necessary. Maybe one day if I'm running a dozen spinning disks I'll make the jump.
(Score: 3, Informative) by sjames on Wednesday May 04 2016, @07:38AM
Suse considers it stable as do many others. The on-disk format has been finalized for years now. I wouldn't touch the RAID-5 or RAID-6 modes with a ten foot pole without extensive re-testing, but the mirroring works well (hence my interest in being able to mount in degraded mode). YMMV.
The same problem affected RAID, but the distros worked around it by assembling the RAID before systemd gets to mess with it.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday May 04 2016, @02:41PM
After IIRC two of my desktop installs on btrfs shat themselves I gave up and jumped to ext4 as well. And one of them was definitely since it was marked "stable."
Although it's been long enough I don't remember clearly and it's possible I did something myself that hosed things.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @08:03AM
In that case, no you don't conceptually understand the arguments against systemd. Or at least not the main one.
Sure, some of us disagree with the systemd way of doing things on a technical level, but so do we disagree with Emacs, vi or both. Yet, the "editor wars" is at most a friendly teasing between the groups.
The main problem with systemd, the one that generates the hate, is that it gets forced upon people like the Telemetry updates in Windows. Oh, if you put a lot of effort into it, you may be able to avoid systemd, just like with enough effort you can avoid the Telemetry updates. But in the end, the only practical way of avoiding systemd is to switch OS. Personally I've had to switch distroes twice (from Arch and Debian) to avoid systemd.
It's not because systemd does things in stupid ways (it does, but so does emacs), it's that it gets forced down our throats.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @02:15PM
Forced down our throats by US Department of Defense...
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Wednesday May 04 2016, @09:39AM
Well, that can't be helped. If people feel like they can't change the situation, they get frustrated and vent impotent rage.
But please entertain the thought that there are also a few people who dislike systemd, and try to change the situation:
Quietly and humbly, and with plenty of trepidation, building something without systemd, rather than trying to take that toy away from its fans.
I personally hope that their conference does *NOT* get disrupted in any serious way.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Bot on Wednesday May 04 2016, @11:18AM
I tend to believe that at least some hate directed against systemd has been totally fake, to victimize its devs when in fact there are elements floating around in mailing lists that say quite the opposite.
The best and only way to fight systemd is contributing to a distro without it.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @05:52PM
none of which were improved by systemd.
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Wednesday May 04 2016, @09:32PM
Why being system'd suck [soylentnews.org] and perhaps why it may be a "nice conference you got there....". Germans papers can't find any explanation why the power company suddenly had scheduled planned maintenance without telling anyone. ;)
So here we go:
The PoettmonD is bad because it tries to take control over all boot and system services. It puts a lot of infrastructure into one process just like Windows does. And causes incompatibilities with application software that just won't work with OS that don't use systemd. There's also problems with replacing specific services as with a modular structure because they are now integrated. There's also the political side of it. It's been pushed down the throat of too many people, some also suspect that RedHat etc tries to derail the FOSS community to their own financial gain and externalizing the disruption.
Other reasons why systemd is bad:
* Feature creep.
* Breaks with Unix philosophy of interconnected utilities with narrowly defined functionalities.
* Software bloat.
* Key systemd developer has bad attitude toward users and bug reports.
* Sloppy testing before shipping.
* Violation of the Unix philosophy, and to "enormous egos who firmly believe they can do no wrong".
* svchost.exe wannabe (a big blob where one service can take down all the other).
* Too many layers of indirection.
* Difficult to predict execution model.
* Non-deterministic boot order.
* Binary logs.
If something is incorrect. I don't mind a comment pointing it out.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 05 2016, @05:11AM
"I can only imagine the IRL trolling and disruption that's going to happen at this."
Likely none, because only dyed in the wool faithful will even bother to go there.
That said, there is a captured on video instance of Poettering disrupting a talk...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTdUmlGxVo0 [youtube.com]
And the systemd faithful gets hissy about the others making noise online (keep in mind that Poettering also put a posting on G+ decrying the "hatefulness" the Linux community)...
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Saturday May 07 2016, @09:27PM
The arrogant prick disrupts around the 50 minute mark [youtube.com].
I hope a large number of people bring a white stick and sunglasses. If anyone complains about the people with sticks bumbling about and getting in the way, just shout "Do you hate blind people!?"
1702845791×2
(Score: 3, Funny) by legont on Wednesday May 04 2016, @05:16AM
Time to do it again.
I even know an experienced pilot. He is 91, but still flies. He used to fly from Iceland, bomb Berlin and continue to Russia; load and bomb Berlin again on the way back.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @07:43AM
It's spelled "engineering".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @08:04AM
or "engendering"
(Score: 3, Touché) by q.kontinuum on Wednesday May 04 2016, @08:22AM
or "endangering"
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @08:41AM
Only by the death of Lenfart Pootering can we be saved!
(The above was brought to you by Tux Brand toiletries.)
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @05:21AM
Unlike last time, when it was only Hitler, we have nukes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @05:43AM
How awesome would it be for someone to shovel out anti-systemd "hacks" during their hackfest?
(Score: 2) by devlux on Wednesday May 04 2016, @06:03AM
SystemD, like emacs but without the ability to edit anything or play tetris.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @06:10AM
Don't worry, that's coming soon.
I'm joking and trolling, but not so much. One of the goals of systemd is to increase unification between distros -- why not add a standard editor? Oh, and fuck POSIX compliance, therefore it can't be vi.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday May 04 2016, @12:50PM
it'll be NANO. Or MSWord. Go ahead, mark my words. Semi-serious.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @02:18PM
[ OK ] Started systemd-msofficed...
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Wednesday May 04 2016, @09:35PM
[ OK ] Started systemd-libreofficed with Windows-10 compat layering...
:P
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @07:08AM
(Score: 2) by devlux on Wednesday May 04 2016, @11:43AM
Oh I'm not complaining. I was karma whoring, off the old vi vs emacs debate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editor_war#Humor [wikipedia.org]
"As a poke at Emacs' creeping featurism, vi advocates have been known to describe Emacs as "a great operating system, lacking only a decent editor".
"hackers joke that there is a proposed method of creating a pseudorandom character sequence by having a user unfamiliar with vi seated in front of an open editor and asking them to exit the program."
etc. ad nauseum
I just skipped all that and use nano instead.
*NIX has been a source of holy wars for a very long time,
As I posted a few weeks ago, my limited experience with SystemD has been not so good. Doesn't seem to work on my newish laptop despite the previous Ubuntu LTS booting and running just fine. I was able to eventually get it working by moving to a distro that was sans SystemD after 2 weeks of fidgeting and fighting with it. Not blaming SystemD here, but its locking up at boot time whereas other init systems don't. I'm hardly a noob, I've been running Linux as my primary OS since 2000 and my sole OS since 2005.
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Wednesday May 04 2016, @06:15AM
is for uninstalling systemd. (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡pɯǝʇsʎs
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @06:26AM
Installing FreeBSD [freebsd.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by b0ru on Wednesday May 04 2016, @07:50AM
Installing FreeBSD [freebsd.org]
QFT. Not to sound like a BSD fanboi (or start a flamewar, for that matter), but with all of this systemd flaming, why haven't the Linux old-hands migrated to another Unix-like? Systemd isn't going anywhere and, if anything, it's only going to get worse. I can absolutely relate to not wanting to dump the system that's always 'just worked' for you, and you know it inside out, but if it's the rc-style configuration you're missing, why not regain some sanity and make the switch? It's very clear that Poettering doesn't care about POSIX, portability, the simplicity of rc-style configuration, or users.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @08:44AM
Also for some of us, reusing userspace between kernels (Although in the *BSDs defence, that applies so erratically on linux as to be almost as useless as on the bsds.)
Mostly though is probably 'Installer, followed by slices, followed by pf instead of iptables, followed by 20 year old patent infringement lawsuits)
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday May 04 2016, @09:50AM
Been using Slackware since 1995. Not about to change soon :-)
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by b0ru on Wednesday May 04 2016, @10:04AM
Indeed. Slack seems to be the last bastion of Sane™ Linux (I still keep a Slack box knocking around at home), but with pulseaudio coming in the next Slack release, systemd may not be far behind. Let's hope not.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @07:07PM
Check out Void (voidlinux.eu). They're using runit for their init system and service management and will not be switching to systemd.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @01:23PM
I've been using Slackware since '95 and inertia is keeping me on Linux. If Slackware goes, I go to one of the BSDs. I've dabbled with BSD in the past so I'm familiar with it. I've been an admin for SunOS, Solaris, HP-UX, Irix, SCO (the real one), Redhat, and various MSDOS and windows versions. I don't like the way Systemd is being forced down our throats like the upgrade to Win10. I still keep a Win7 partition around but only boot it on patch friday (patch tuesday + safety margin). Yes, I'm retired, a grey beard and aspiring BOFH.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday May 04 2016, @12:54PM
why haven't the Linux old-hands migrated to another Unix-like?
Because we have? I'm lovin freebsd. ZFS is freaking awesome. Its "real unix" not "I'm gonna make me a gnome bootloader for my vaporware tablet". The community is nicer. Arguably ports and pkgng is bigger than the apt-get ecosystem, if it isn't, it certainly is at least similarly huge.
This is why I disagree with the post above claiming they'll be trolling. There probably will be some because they're such juicy and responsive targets, but most serious folks have moved on to freebsd or are checking out the recent beta of Devuan as their upgrade path until they freebsd..
(Score: 3, Insightful) by b0ru on Wednesday May 04 2016, @01:06PM
Disclaimer: I'm a long time FreeBSD user.
FreeBSD did jump on the Linux bandwagon a bit; HAL, dbus and stuff like that, whilst NetBSD and OpenBSD managed to avoid it. I like FreeBSD. It's consistent, it stays out of my way, let's me get work done and I get everything I need from ports. Simple rc-style configuration, jails, capsicum, PF and ZFS are worth their weight in gold. As you've said, the community and documentation are more or less exemplary by comparison, but some of the directions they've taken over the years are a bit boggling. I hope the project will stay the course, and not be a victim of its own success as more and more Linux refugees migrate.
(Score: 2) by devlux on Wednesday May 04 2016, @01:27PM
Speaking from the "not BSD" camp. BSD is an awesome and capable OS, but is severely lacking in driver support.
This isn't much of a problem if you're a sysadmin just doing a job or running it as a server, or basically doing "Normal stuff".
However I develop software as a big part of my living. This software needs to be able to compile and run and a big part of that, is getting it to run on mobile devices as well.
AFAIK adb and the android dev toolchain does not function under any BSD except for OSX.
Also I use a laptop as my main and almost never have a desktop at hand, I've never seen a BSD variant that had either video drivers or wifi drivers for recently current laptops and by the time that support does make it in, usually 2 or 3 years later, my laptop is EOL and I'm off to the next one. This used to be a big problem in Linux for a long time, but the situation started getting a lot better around 2005. For some reason it's still a big issue in the BSD camp. (note I' haven't actually tried BSD this refresh cycle, so my knowledge is 3+ years out of date, but I haven't heard any major improvements).
(Score: 2) by b0ru on Wednesday May 04 2016, @01:44PM
The driver issue is largely a problem of available help; the Linux kernel has an army of contributors -- both from companies writing drivers to support their hardware on Linux, and engineers like ourselves who contribute to projects in our spare time. The former is a very formidable force; I can't count the number of times I've received a PFO or request to sign an NdA by a company when requesting documentation for a particular piece of hardware (scientific instruments and commercial hardware alike), which has left me with no other choice but to RE their binary blobs myself, or see what they've written for other systems. Naturally, this is a slow, tedious process, but this is just one of the many hurdles of such endeavours, and one which BSD maintainers can no doubt relate to.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by rleigh on Wednesday May 04 2016, @08:57PM
I already mostly did, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. I hope that we continue to have Linux distributions which remain systemd-free to retain some measure of diversity, such as Gentoo, Slackware and Devuan, and if it remains viable for the long-term, then I will continue to use Linux. But right now, I've been moving progressively to FreeBSD over the last 2.5 years.
To be honest, I should have looked into it much earlier. But it's easy to stay within your comfort zone and discount the other possibilities. I used Debian for 18 years. That's a long time, and while I'm shocked the time passed so quickly, over that time I invested a huge amount of my life into it. Both as a user and as a developer. In a very real sense, Debian *was* my life, as the primary focus of my efforts for well over a decade and half, and a large part of my social circle. To say I was emotionally attached to its success and progress would be a gross understatement. I was an early tester of systemd while I was doing sysvinit maintenance. I had high hopes for it; improving upon sysvinit was not an unreasonable goal, many other projects have already tried this. I spent many man weeks reimplementing certain bits of systemd policy over to our initscripts and initramfs; some parts are genuinely useful, and I also had hopes of collaboration and a positive mutual relationship. Unfortunately, the relationship was a one-way thing, and it became clear early on that the scope of systemd was unbounded and the our-way-or-the-highway attitude was terrible. It took several years of flamewars and passive-aggressive nonsense to finally sap all my remaining enthusiasm, before I saw no future left in it and was getting no pleasure out of it any more. Bad RSI also didn't help. Good design matters. Backward compatibility matters. Not being raging arseholes to your users and fellow developers matters. The whole situation is a giant, horrible mess, and the fact that we actually got into this situation is incredible and unbelievable.
I, like many others got into Linux in the '90s because we liked freedom. Both in terms of licensing, and in terms of having the practical freedom to do whatever we liked with our systems. Just like young, lean companies lose their focus and become bumbling crusty behemoths like the companies they originally supplanted (Microsoft?), today's Linux has become dominated by a small number of corporate interests to its detriment, and is no longer a cornucopia of great ideas and hordes of enthusiastic hackers pushing the boundaries. It's become what we started using it to escape, and for me that means it's time to move on. Linux used to be *fun*, exciting, interesting and yes, a bit buggy. But it wasn't the bland corporateware it's become. It's not all bad, of course, but it's lost something important, not least of which is the ability of the developer collective to push back against bad design and bad code pushed by a dominant company. It's vendor lock-in and control under a free software licence--dictating policy and using lots of undocumented baroque APIs is outwith the scope of licensing, but its right out of the Microsoft playbook of yore.
(Score: 2) by novak on Thursday May 05 2016, @04:25AM
Because we don't need to. See, old Unix hands that actually know how the system works can and have been setting our systems up the way we want for years. Running a distro without systemd isn't impossible or even difficult. I don't want to switch to a different OS because I run a ton of pretty non-standard software that I really don't want to port.
Linux is so versatile, used on everything from uclinux routers to the world's top supercomputers, that regardless of default choices made in some or all distros you can still build it just the way you want.
novak
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @08:09AM
How well does Steam[1] run on FreeBSD?
(asking because I'm considering FreeBSD in case I get forced to switch distro yet again).
[1] Including the games, of course.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by b0ru on Wednesday May 04 2016, @08:14AM
Valve don't support FreeBSD, but the LBC layer [freebsd.org] in FreeBSD is actually pretty solid, with 64-bit support having just arrived in 10.3-RELEASE [freebsd.org]. That said, I haven't tried running it. I can attest to other proprietary Linux programs I use running flawlessly on top of LBC.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday May 04 2016, @01:15PM
Devuan beta?
https://devuan.org/ [devuan.org]
Disclaimer, I have not tried this, I'm shutting off my linux boxes and bringing up freebsd boxes faster than I could convert to devuan. My automation system recipes work for debian or freebsd but I don't have automation for conversion from debian to devuan so I've not tried, it would probably take longer than starting a new freebsd instance and sending ansible/puppet after it. I've heard a lot of good stuff about it.
(Score: 3, Touché) by kazzie on Wednesday May 04 2016, @06:26AM
Who's bringing the meat cleavers?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @01:51PM
Beheadings of infidels begins on Day 2.
(Score: 3, Funny) by coolgopher on Wednesday May 04 2016, @07:54AM
"Nuke the entire site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure!"
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Wednesday May 04 2016, @08:30AM
Or what do they mean my hands on other than my hands on someone specifics throat?
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @09:12AM
It would be a shame if someone were to cover the venue in satirical cartoons of the Holy Prophet Mohammed, Peace be Upon Him.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @05:34PM
Mod parent redundant! Systemd is already an insult to all that's holy...
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @09:37AM
Oh wait, there WEREN'T any SysV init hackathons/conferences. Why is that?
Because SysV init scripts don't require some dog-and-pony PR show to quash dissent. They just worked, having been the product of decades of evolution. Conversely, this whole SystemDCon thing represents a cheap attempt to curry favor among a consumer base that's fundamentally dissatisfied with the direction things are going.
Follow the money. Look at the sponsors at the bottom of this: https://conf.systemd.io/ [systemd.io]
As an addendum, to the poster asking where the dissenters (and greybeards) have gone: We're all moving, at various speeds, to FreeBSD and OpenBSD. I never thought I'd say that, having spent most of my career making fun of the *BSDs and their waxy-skinned, pimply adherents.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by pTamok on Wednesday May 04 2016, @11:01AM
*BSD has many merits, but abandoning GPL licensed software might not be an approach you will think was optimal when considered with hindsight.
Other greybeards are moving to Linux distributions that offer other inits, which while being a small minority now, have the potential to grow.
Very few people would argue that SysV init cannot be improved for many use-cases, but I believe quite a few can argue, with justification, that the systemd 'ecosystem' is not suitable for many use-cases. A lot of those who consider the matter carefully are in favour of maintaining an easy choice of init systems, and other software, suitable for radically different use-cases.
One of the fundamental reasons for running GPL-licenced software is to enable choice, also known as freedom to use software. BSD licensing allows slightly different choices. The systemd appraoch is making it more difficult for the general user to choose to use different desktop environments, different login demons, different network management software etc. Preservation of choice allows you to choose the most appropriate software for your needs, and no-one can seriously argue that one approach suits all needs.
There is room for the systemd approach, but it isn't, and shouldn't be, the only one.
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Wednesday May 04 2016, @12:47PM
*BSD has many merits, but abandoning GPL licensed software might not be an approach you will think was optimal when considered with hindsight.
The only reason I hadn't considered BSD in the past was the difference in licensing. But if I can't avoid systemd in Linux then licensing suddenly becomes much less important.
Hopefully I'm safe for a while with Slackware (which has become my main reason for not switching).
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @01:28PM
Funny; I find the truly free licensing one of BSD's strongest attractions. The GPL is too restrictive.
(Score: 3, Disagree) by tangomargarine on Wednesday May 04 2016, @02:22PM
"Truly free" licensing as in you get the freedom to ignore the license. You're allowed to incorporate it into your product without needing to keep it open-source. So by "too restrictive" you mean "having any restrictions at all."
So basically GPL is like "the only thing we can't tolerate is intolerance;" BSD says "yeah sure, whatever. Be intolerant if you want."
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @08:54PM
yeah right. corporate whores and/or complete pacifists(not necessarily you) love the bsd license. It allows some leech to take software that didn't cost them anything at all, lock the whole thing down, re-brand it and profit! The gpl "restriction" is simply a protection of future user's freedoms. I don't really consider licenses that don't protect freedom as being free software licenses.
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Wednesday May 04 2016, @09:49PM
You're right. But it also means that BSD code can't be used unrestrained in the corporate environment because the don't have to fear management going crazy over the risk to having to open source their product that provides the income because of some slight mistake.
So companies add to BSD because they know they can later re-use the code without any legal mess.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Wednesday May 04 2016, @11:34PM
Did you intend to write "GPL" rather than "BSD" in your second sentence?
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Thursday May 05 2016, @09:22AM
Nope, because unlike GPL. The BSD code can wander into corporate products and out without having to untangle any great licensing issues.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Thursday May 05 2016, @09:41AM
You had written "BSD code can't be used unrestrained in the corporate environment [soylentnews.org]" in response to someone who was writing about the GPL.
It seemed to me that "GPL code can't be used unrestrained in the corporate environment" would have made more sense. Never mind, though.
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Thursday May 05 2016, @10:16AM
oops.. serious typo ;-)
(Score: 2) by rleigh on Wednesday May 04 2016, @09:10PM
This is a general reply for all the posts in this subthread, not just this one.
Linux: Contains a GPL kernel and a userland of mixed licences, predominantly BSD and GPL
BSD: Contains a BSD kernel and a base userland of mixed licences, predominantly BSD and GPL, and a ports tree of mixed licences, again predominantly BSD and GPL
Both systems use both licences extensively. The debate over which is better is entirely moot except as a theoretical academic exercise. You can't use one or the other, both systems use both extensively. Look at the Linux kernel, and see how a good bit of it is BSD code, which is perfectly OK to import and incorporate into a GPL work. Look at FreeBSD base, and see how many GPL projects are embedded into the base system, including such fundamentals as the linker. Look at the stuff built on top, such as the BSD ports tree and the Linux distribution package collections, and you'll see a diverse mixture. While FreeBSD might have replacement of GPL code with BSD as a long-term goal, there's still a bunch of GPL code in base.
Individual projects choose licences, but *systems* are a mixture, and always will be. We're long past the point where it's possible to write a whole system from scratch under a uniform licence.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @11:19AM
Devuan is really much more functional than you can imagine.
It is faster and easier to upgrade from Debian Wheezy to Devuan 1.0 than to jessie.
Give it a try, you wont be dissatisfacted
https://www.devuan.org/ [devuan.org]
https://files.devuan.org/ [devuan.org] (prefer the torrent, you can download the only required iso in less than a minute)
Bye
gl
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @12:28PM
I moved to antiX MX. Join us?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday May 04 2016, @01:04PM
the *BSDs and their waxy-skinned, pimply adherents.
Yeah, as if when I looked at the audience at BSDCan they looked any different than the audience at linux confs or HOPE.
Because SysV init scripts ... just worked,
The only serious architectural problem I had in 20 years was the rather strident complainers who demanded /bin/sh change from bash to dash because "muh boot times" as if anyone else cares, and in my conversion from linux to freebsd my shell scripts full of "#!/bin/bash" have all changed to "#!/usr/bin/env bash" to be multiculturally compatible across legacy linux and new freebsd deployed boxes. On freebsd bash lives in /usr/local/bin/bash after ansible or whatever you use for automation runs "pkg install bash" for you. You can install a symlink from /usr/local/bin/bash to /bin/bash or wtf but its kinda smelly way of doing it.
Much like there are people in 2016 who complain about mysql "doesn't have transactions" because it was added back in '96 and they haven't thought about it since, there are people in the freebsd world who like to complain about nasty single file /etc/rc.conf not understanding the directory /etc/rc.conf.d was added some time ago (donno how long). Thats a sorta a shell script ish or init ish rant kinda although not exactly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @02:07PM
The reason for using dash in scripts is to make them POSIX compliant, well-specified and portable. Bash is a gigantic overweight, insecure mess. It is a fine thing for interactive use, but using it in scripts is just stupid, lazy, and ignorant.
What a truly grotesque lunacy. That is exactly bass ackwards. My scripts all say "#!/usr/bin/env sh", and all my linux systems have either dash, or the heirloom Bourne shell [sourceforge.net] installed, with a symlink to it as "sh" ahead of the brain-dead "sh" bash symlink in my path. All my scriptage is based and tested on the SVR4 subset of POSIX, and runs on anything you can find still alive, including Solaris. They are also automatically compatible with any of the BSD shells, and they also run fine if for some ungodly reason all you have is bash.
There isn't a [[ ... ]] or (( ... )) abortion or a $#string in any of them. I don't want anyone who can't shell-script without crap like that anywhere near my systems.
Not to mention /etc/rc.conf.local and /etc/rc.d. What it DOESN'T have is the forest of symlinks in /etc/rc[0-6].d that infests SYSVINIT. People forget that the script system in BSD init is quite different than that in SYSVINIT init: much more straightforward and rational.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @04:56PM
Sysvinit doesn't have to be a mess of scripts and it also has the ability to restart daemons when they die. I think the reason why is that they haven't actually read the docs for init tab and distros have the legacy of scripts that they keep adding on to, which like most code makes perfect since to them but you have to get in the right place to read. First thing I do on a new system is rip out a lot of that crap and put it in a much more readable init tab and my own code.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @03:52PM
I was expecting a list of sponsors that looked a little more diabolical. Redhat, coreos, and some smaller shops, not exactly unrelated.
(Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Wednesday May 04 2016, @06:54PM
Apparently all those "decades" are somehow meaningless, seeing how software engineering has become the only science where tried and true principles are viewed as something "old" that somehow wears out like an old Buick....but what do I know?...maybe it's just the old gray-beards that believe in gravity and shit...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @10:09PM
That's one of the reasons I don't consider software an engineering discipline. The other reason is there's no established credentialing and verification system like with other engineering fields that protects the public. Junior structural engineers work under a licensed engineer who signs off on their work and if a building falls down there's someone to blame. MSFT can ship Windows operating systems that are the equivalent of buildings falling down and they get to just say, "caveat emptor". Poettering isn't an engineer. Software isn't engineering.
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Wednesday May 04 2016, @09:55PM
The sponsor list is:
collabora.com
coreos.com
pengutronix.de
redhat.com
kinvolk.io
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 05 2016, @05:19AM
Collabora seems to crop up more and more regarding controversial Linux changes...
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Thursday May 05 2016, @09:17AM
Collabora seems to be a private company based in Cambridge, United Kingdom and founded by Robert McQueen, Philippe Kalaf and Robert Taylor. Are there any suspicious links anywhere? Ie bad clients or financial support etc.
Btw, any tip on corporate register lookup page for UK and USA?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 05 2016, @02:51PM
There is likely nothing willfully nasty going on, just a bunch of people that are cocksure they are improving the Linux UX...
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Thursday May 05 2016, @04:46PM
Eternal September for the Linux source code. Time to fork them off and keep them out.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @11:57AM
Could this include also a leisure trip, for the attendants, in the new poettering's redesing of the Hindenburg ?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @07:15PM
[ OK ] Started systemd-zeppelind
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 05 2016, @02:08AM
Oh, the humanity!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 05 2016, @02:05PM
Oh, the huge manatee!
(Score: 2) by curunir_wolf on Wednesday May 04 2016, @04:16PM
I am a crackpot
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @09:38PM
Berliners couldn't keep The Third Reich, so still have to put up with punishments such as systemd. If there were still a Third Reich, there would be no systemd.