For years, Google used an in-house Linux distribution called Goobuntu (based on Ubuntu LTS releases), as its development platform. No more.
After more than five years with Ubuntu, Google is replacing Goobuntu with gLinux, a Linux distribution based on Debian Testing.
[...] As MuyLinux reports, gLinux is being built from the source code of the packages and Google introduces its own changes to it. The changes will also be contributed to the upstream.
[...] How does Google plan to move to Debian Testing? The current Debian Testing release is upcoming Debian 10 Buster. Google has developed an internal tool to migrate the existing systems from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to Debian 10 Buster. Project leader Margarita claimed in the Debconf talk that tool was tested to be working fine.
Google also plans to send the changes to Debian Upstream and hence contributing to its development.
[...] Back in 2012, Canonical had clarified that Google is not their largest business desktop customer. However, it is safe to say that Google was a big customer for them. As Google prepares to switch to Debian, this will surely result in revenue loss for Canonical.
(Score: 5, Informative) by frojack on Tuesday January 23 2018, @07:30PM (22 children)
That Google pays canonical for anything is simply Google's way of buying influence, and supporting FOSS. Apparently that influence wasn't forthcoming, and Google already does a great deal of FOSS support in other ways. If Google could use its influence (and money) to quell some of the self inflicted drama that Debian always seems to have simmering it would be great.
Google doesn't need any help from Canonical to install, update, maintain, and enhance their internal version of Ubuntu. Probably Google could teach Canonical a whole bag of tricks, especially with regard to reducing extraneous packages and making servers very efficient,
Because Google doesn't market their internal distro, they don't have to return anything they develop.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 23 2018, @07:55PM (2 children)
My experience suggests that Google knows nothing about such efficiency; Google's solution is to throw more computing, more contractors, and more money at any problem that gets in the way. Code monkeys to the rescue!
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 23 2018, @08:20PM
He was a relatively unknown magician who finally stumbled upon the opportunity to perform in front of a large audience. He did not intend to waste this chance, so he decided to pull out all the stops...
The obese magician pointed at a little boy in the audience to signify that he would be the volunteer for this trick. The boy's parents encouraged him to get up on stage, and so he did. There were no props or tools to be seen, so the audience began wondering what sort of trick would be performed. Then, the red curtains closed, thereby concealing the boy and the magician. 'Just what kind of trick is this?' the audience thought to themselves.
Soon after the curtains closed, the audience heard the man telling the boy to take off his clothes. This was followed by the boy sobbing and telling the magician that he didn't want to. Next, the man screamed at the boy to follow his orders. It wasn't long before the audience could hear slapping sounds, as though flesh was colliding with flesh repeatedly. In addition, the sound of a man moaning could be heard. Several minutes later, the curtains began to open...
What the audience witnessed next was beyond their ability to comprehend. Was it really a trick, or was it true magic!? Marvelous! The audience saw the boy naked and lying in a pool of his own blood, utterly motionless. The magician was sweating heavily and looked like he was in a state of euphoria. The magician then said "Tadaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!" 'How did he do it!?' the audience thought to themselves. Then, every single person who bore witness to this magnificent event - including the boy's parents - gave the performer a standing ovation. Someone shouted, "How did you do it!? I need to know how this amazing trick was performed!" The magician smiled and said simply, "A magician doesn't reveal his tricks." Everyone laughed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 24 2018, @03:07AM
From what I've seen google do it's not even that, they just add more PRNG iterations to their various AI (bruteforce by another name) algorithms which nobody there actually understands anymore.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 23 2018, @07:59PM
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goobuntu [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1) by bobthecimmerian on Tuesday January 23 2018, @08:29PM
I'd be curious whether Google actually did ever pay Canonical much. Google has their own colossal set of engineers and admins, why would they pay an outside company for support?
And to be fair to Canonical, Google has to support their own internal services and tools. They don't have to support thousands of packages in thousands of combinations by all kinds of users. Don't get me wrong, whether you love Google or hate them the company is an engineering powerhouse. But I'm sure Google isn't maintaining twelve different mp3 tag editors and nineteen file managers and Ada compilers (for example) on its internal Linux distributions. They have harder 'Big Data' problems to solve but easier distribution management problems.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Nuke on Tuesday January 23 2018, @08:52PM (16 children)
It is a shame they did not pick Devuan instead of Debian. Same flavour but without systemd.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday January 23 2018, @09:14PM (3 children)
Why does it matter? It's Google. How does it affect you? Do you just want them to hand Devuan devs some $$$?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 23 2018, @10:45PM (2 children)
yes
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 24 2018, @05:05AM (1 child)
Anything that google invest money into (mozilla etc) inevitably turns to shit. You must not like devuan very much.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday January 24 2018, @03:54PM
Google hasn't had much incentive to make Mozilla better ever since they started making their own web browser.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday January 23 2018, @09:25PM (5 children)
In principle: I don't like systemd!
I think the problems systemd solves could have been better solved in a more modular way instead of one giant MCP from Tron.
Being pragmatic, if systemd is going to be rammed down my throat, then I sure do want it to work well. Having lots of development resources, like Google engineers, helps make that happen.
In the end, we'll end up with more standards across more distributions -- which I think can only make things better. Why can't services be handled in a standard way? Have a standard system message bus. Have only one type of "script" or "config" file you have to write to get your server daemon to run on any distribution. Wouldn't that be nice?
Now if we could have only one packaging format. And one package dependency graph more like Docker containers. I suppose these things might come one day, but it just seems to take so darn long compared to how proprietary companies can simply dictate how things will work. Not that I want to use closed source instead. Police work is also easy in a police state -- and I don't want to live there.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by frojack on Tuesday January 23 2018, @09:40PM (1 child)
Man who rants about police state demands single packaging tool. Film at 11.
Bitches about Giant MCP, having never looked at the code, then dreams about all the things systemd already does, and says wistfully "Wouldn't that be nice".
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 23 2018, @09:49PM
Reading comprehension, do you need a refresher course?
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday January 23 2018, @09:45PM (1 child)
What would be the point of different distributions if they were all essentially the same with only cosmetic differences?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday January 23 2018, @10:47PM
It can be more than cosmetic differences.
First, the "cosmetics". Different desktop environments do have real, material usability differences. Users have strong preferences for different ways of working. Distributions can be focused on different primary users based on default applications.
Second, looking beneath the desktop environment (if any!). Some distributions might be focused on being extremely lightweight. (Alpine) Which makes them a good starting point for, example, Docker containers. Or focused on being a server without any desktop. Or distributions focused on being the best desktop.
Standardization is a GOOD thing to the extent that it makes it possible for package developers to make ONE build and have it work on all distributions.
Distributions could focus on security. Or running everything in a container.
It seems to me that having more standardization doesn't kill having lots of distributions. But maybe it kills having a pointlessly large number of incompatible distributions. And hey, it's open source, nobody is stopping anybody from building whatever they think is best.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 24 2018, @10:03PM
i would like it if most distros could agree on some kind of upstream source standard so any distro's package manager can automatically build any upstream project. distros could focus on security, user facing features, the packaging systems themselves, or whatever they cared about, instead of just manual maintenance of packages.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by frojack on Tuesday January 23 2018, @09:28PM (4 children)
Companies of Google scale are exactly the benefactors of systemd.
That said, I haven't had any significant problems with systemd. The docos are readable, the source code is easily perused, and writing you own systemd services is drop dead simple.
I now groan when I have to maintain older systems.
And yeah, I was originally against systemd in the beginning when it was barely functional.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 23 2018, @10:00PM (1 child)
Reserve a little paranoia for systemd now making it really easy to hide backdoors that now get pushed to all Linux systems.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday January 23 2018, @10:53PM
True. But there are lots of places to hide backdoors into large numbers of Linux systems.
And the whole "trusting trust" type of compromise / paranoia.
Compromise is possible in the boot loader.
And in the firmware. (And ability to lock you out of even booting!)
And thanks to Intel Management Engine, in the microprocessor itself. Compromise baked right into the hardware!
And Spectre and Meltdown.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday January 23 2018, @10:50PM
Yep. I was originally a complainer about systemd. I haven't had any trouble with it. It seems to work. As you say about services.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 23 2018, @11:39PM
THERE ARE NO DOCS.
It is by design that the design is not visible to the public.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 23 2018, @11:54PM
How would that help anyone? Systemd is fantastic for containerised, headless or rapid spin-up and spin-down deployments, the kind that Google would be using.
Not just due to boot speed (which is almost entirely irrelevant), it starts things, isolates things and makes sure they're running - all from a single unified configuration. You don't need to mess around with supervisord and so on to build something decently robust and resilient.
Plus, many current container management stacks do depend on parts of systemd in the host environment.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 23 2018, @08:34PM (8 children)
Ubuntu is a Debian derivative. What was the reason(s) for the change anyways?
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday January 23 2018, @09:28PM (5 children)
I'm just guessing. Pure speculation.
Google might find it to be in its best interest to move upstream from Ubuntu. If Google helps improve Debian, doesn't this still help improve Ubuntu? And other Debian derived distributions? Therefore Google might have a choice of more Debian derived distributions which would have Google's improvements and be suitable for Google's requirements.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday January 23 2018, @09:33PM (2 children)
That's my guess as well. They wanted to cut out at least one layer of middle men.
Note that they moved from Ubuntu Stable (lte) to to Debian Testing.
Apparently with the subset of server oriented stuff that Google needs, testing is more than good enough. Testing is where end users are banging away on it trying out every imaginable desktop environment and reporting bugs in same, but the underlying OS is usually solid at the testing stage.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Tuesday January 23 2018, @10:43PM (1 child)
Ubuntu is based on Debian Testing anyway, so having a version called "Ubuntu Stable" in the first place is slightly misleading.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Wednesday January 24 2018, @12:15PM
Well, there isn't such a version.
There's Ubuntu LTS, which stands for "Long Term Support". That's a version of Ubuntu which is supported substantially longer than other versions - where "support" means that it receives updates for security issues and a few other cases.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 23 2018, @10:47PM (1 child)
So you are saying thatg systemd solves the right set of problems in the wrong way. ? As a Arch linux user I find that the systemd guy was the only one to come with a comprehensive solution and I understand the distro packager choice of going with systemd.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Wednesday January 24 2018, @08:27AM
systemd is excellent at solving certain problems found with other inits. The problem is, it doesn't play nicely if you want to mix and match modules/functions with other approaches, and it is a bit big for people with embedded and/or small systems. As it has assumed more and more capabilities, it has become a dependency for many other applications whose programmers, naturally, want to do the least work for the most benefit, and thus only offer systemd compatibility, meaning that anyone who wishes to eschew systemd suddenly has the need to fork large amounts of code, or write a separate shim - likely in an area they do not specialise in.
We are at the de facto point that we no longer have GNU/Linux for most people - we have GNU/systemd/Linux. There are some small distributions that don't use systemd (without-systemd.org gives a list [without-systemd.org] ), but 'mainstream' distributions are all systemd users. This is close to a monoculture that some people regard as dangerous, for many reasons. As systemd doesn't suppot non-Linux kernels, maybe it will give more impetus to GNU/Hurd (he says, drily) - or, as we have seen, a lot of people have moved to one of the BSDs. For people who regard the GPL as important, this latter is not regarded as a good step, and tends to be rather contentious for those who care about such things.
I expect in a couple of decades, something else will come along to be concerned about. In the meantime there will be a lot of bitter infighting about things that most people neither know or care about. Whether they should is another debate.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday January 23 2018, @11:18PM
Another speculation, to go along with DannyB's?
Maybe Ubuntu is too restrictive, in some way. I can't name any, this is just speculation, after all. But, I remember making my own move away from Ubuntu, because Ubuntu was moving toward Unity. Basically, Ubuntu said, "This is the way we are going, like it or leave." So, I left. It's been years since I ran Ubuntu now, maybe they have become more responsive to the community's wishes. Maybe not. And, maybe Ubuntu has simply turned into a heap of shit - I don't know. But, I can speculate that something about Ubuntu has put a burr under Google's saddle, so they've gone upstream where there are fewer burrs.
No matter about any of that, though. If you're interested in source code, then why not go directly to the source? Some middle man's version of what the source is all about may or may not be accurate. Go to the source for the source code, and you know you've got it straight.
(Score: 2) by http on Tuesday January 23 2018, @11:46PM
Ubuntu is based on the branch of Debian that is explicitly marked as "not ready for prime time or production use." This is the reason why Canonical can make money supporting Ubuntu - it needs it!
I browse at -1 when I have mod points. It's unsettling.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 23 2018, @08:44PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 24 2018, @12:01AM
It's about the same amount of work as any other Linux distro - end users aren't building an entire system from source like Gentoo. Just the gLinux central repo maintainers. Everyone else would still pull down binary packages with apt.
It isn't uncommon for large organisations that find value in the Linux ecosystem to run a fully or semi-customised build like this - adding or replacing a few upstream packages for ones more appropriate to their requirements, up to fully building the whole repo from source to ensure they're using validated and reviewed source code on internal systems.