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posted by martyb on Friday February 08 2019, @05:14AM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-all-geek-to-me dept.

https://lwn.net/Articles/777595/

LWN (Linux Weekly News) provides a written account of Benno Rice's talk. The former FreeBSD core developer gives some context around systemd and what FreeBSD should learn from it. He compares the affair to a Greek tragedy which contains much suffering followed by catharsis. His attitude toward systemd is generally not negative, but I won't cherry-pick any specific sections; you'll have to actually read the article for once.


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  • (Score: 4, Funny) by takyon on Friday February 08 2019, @05:16AM (3 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday February 08 2019, @05:16AM (#798178) Journal

    Woe is D.

    --
    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
    • (Score: 5, Funny) by zocalo on Friday February 08 2019, @07:24AM (1 child)

      by zocalo (302) on Friday February 08 2019, @07:24AM (#798208)
      Systemd, or not systemd: that is the question:
      Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
      The slings and arrows of installing Linux,
      Or to take arms against a sea of stability issues,
      And just install BSD?
      --
      UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Freeman on Friday February 08 2019, @05:12PM

        by Freeman (732) on Friday February 08 2019, @05:12PM (#798409) Journal

        I'll have my cake and eat it too. Long live MX Linux!

        --
        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: 5, Funny) by driverless on Friday February 08 2019, @10:39AM

      by driverless (4770) on Friday February 08 2019, @10:39AM (#798254)

      I am the way into the daemon of woe.
      I am the way to a forsaken concept.
      I am the way into eternal sorrow.
      Sacred injustice moved Poettering.
      I was raised here by divine ignorance,
      Primordial madness and ultimate insanity.
      Only those elements time cannot wear
      Were made before me, and beyond time I stand.
      Abandon all hope ye who enter here.

  • (Score: 5, Informative) by canopic jug on Friday February 08 2019, @05:50AM (21 children)

    by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Friday February 08 2019, @05:50AM (#798192) Journal

    The summary above is way off. His is a propaganda piece. He was there at LCA to sing the praises of system's talking points not criticize it. It's not even an init system, as he pretends.

    The guy is a systemd booster making the Linux and BSD conference circuit in praise of systemd and how the equivalent should be brought into the BSDs, or at least FreeBSD. He says nothing more or less than what Poettering and his crowd have been bleating for years. However, he does deliver their logic-free talking points [blogspot.com] with a pleasant tone of voice, a soft smile, and without the condescending attitude of Poettering. So those that pay attention to tone rather than content are quite fooled.

    There are also videos:

    The gist:

    1. Newer is better
    2. Frequent use of straw men
    3. False dichotomy between systemd omg now,now,now,hurry or SysV init forevermore
    4. Personal attacks on anyone not praising systemd

    He knows darn well what he is saying is false. For him, he also did the FreeBSD CoC, the tragedy appears to be his disappointment that it has not yet been adopted in FreeBSD.

    --
    Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @07:01AM (6 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @07:01AM (#798205)

      And one of his points is basically, "If you haven't implemented something like PulseAudio or SystemD yourself, you aren't qualified to criticize it."

      Which seems unfair, because of course I haven't implemented a SystemD-alike. I may well be incapable, but I haven't tried because I think it's a bad idea. Why would I write something stupid just to get an 'argument from authority' foot in the door to be allowed to have an opinion? I have implemented plenty of other useful stuff that worked just fine, and you've never heard of me because nothing I wrote pissed off legions of people. Let me know when Poettering can say as much, and I'll listen to his opinion.

      • (Score: 5, Insightful) by canopic jug on Friday February 08 2019, @07:38AM

        by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Friday February 08 2019, @07:38AM (#798212) Journal

        And one of his points is basically, "If you haven't implemented something like PulseAudio or SystemD yourself, you aren't qualified to criticize it."

        One of the counter metaphors to his assertion, from the early stages of systemd infestation, is to point out that one does not need to be a baker to know whether bread is stale.

        --
        Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
      • (Score: 5, Touché) by Bot on Friday February 08 2019, @07:41AM (1 child)

        by Bot (3902) on Friday February 08 2019, @07:41AM (#798214) Journal

        "If you haven't implemented something like PulseAudio or SystemD yourself, you aren't qualified to criticize it."

        I like that line of reasoning. The pope can't speak about marriage. You can't speak about your pal doing crack cocaine. "if you haven't been aborted you aren't qualified to criticize it".

        --
        Account abandoned.
        • (Score: 2, Funny) by khallow on Saturday February 09 2019, @04:22AM

          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday February 09 2019, @04:22AM (#798700) Journal

          "if you haven't been aborted you aren't qualified to criticize it".

          Excellent advice. If only I were qualified to listen to it!

      • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @09:01AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @09:01AM (#798235)

        Yesterday I spent over an hour bashing my head against systemd.
        I suspect those who wrote it saw Microsoft tech, thought it was good, and tried to make their own.

        It's just frustrating. Annoying.

        If you care, I have got to the point of rebooting the computer to see if that magically fixes whatever the frick is wrong. Ffs.

      • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @02:56PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @02:56PM (#798308)

        And one of his points is basically, "If you haven't implemented something like PulseAudio or SystemD yourself, you aren't qualified to criticize it."

        I've installed PulseAudio and it made my sound not work and it was impossible to diagnose the problem. I had to wait for my system to update and then it magically worked again. I would not trust the same development team with my boot system.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by pTamok on Friday February 08 2019, @07:58AM (8 children)

      by pTamok (3042) on Friday February 08 2019, @07:58AM (#798222)

      I was going to write something similar, but modded you up instead. I'm interested in systemd, and had hoped that it would be an informative talk, taking an unbiased view of the arguments put forward both by proponents of systemd, and its detractors. It was neither, bring mostly a content free puff piece.

      There are reasons to believe systemd is a good thing. There are also well-founded criticisms. Part of the reasons systemd came about was because many people found the then existing init systems to be deficient for their needs. As a result different groups came up with different proposals that addressed their needs with things like OpenRC (addresses problems with startup dependencies), Upstart (an event-based init system), and Runit (and extremely minimal init system), and of course MacOS's launchd. systemd was one 'colour' in a spectrum of init systems each of which addressed the most salient problems of differing groups of users.

      systemd was adopted as the Red Hat distribution's choice of init, and was controverisally chosen to be a most-favoured-among-equals init system for the Debian distribution. As a large number of Linux distributions base themselves off these two 'core' distributions, it meant that a very large number of distributions now used systemd as their init. This set of events did not suit all people, and some have been very vocal about their misgivings with this course of events. Others can point out reasons why systemd does not suit them, often in quite deep technical detail.

      Two large criticisms of systemd are: that the circumstances around its adoption have made it difficult to choose other init systems - it has, de facto, reduced choice; and that it tries to do too much - while it is not monolithic as many critics claim, it does integrate a lot of different capabilities in different modules that were not historically regarded as being within an init system's purview - and in trying to do too much, it fails in unexpected ways.

      It does not help that the lead author of systemd is a 'Marmite' personality - some people like his approach very much, others find it unconscionable. A mixture of arguing over arcane technical points and oil-and-water personality clashes has not made the discussions easy.

      My 'daily driver' PC uses systemd, and it hasn't caused me many problems. I get entries in my logs showing errors in shutdowns which cannot be resolved - the bug is not a WONTFIX, but the systemd programmers don't see any prospect of fixing it in the near term. My PC has enough resources not to need the minimalist approach of runit. On the other hand, I use OpenWrt in other devices where systemd would not be appropriate - so I am in favour of having an easy choice of init systems (and associated software). As more and more software makes the assumption that the facilities offered by systemd are available, preserving that valuable choice for when systemd is not appropriate is important to me, and to a minority of other GNU/Linux users.

      I could talk for a couple of hours about systemd and criticise some of the choices made in its design and implementation, but it is not 'garbage' - it has does have some really good ideas. However, the (almost) monoculture it has engendered is not, for me, a positive development.

      I was hoping this advertised talk would take a measured view of systemd's benefits, point out where it appears to have gone wrong (in the presenter's opinion), and offer some suggestions on how things could be improved in future. My expectations were not met.

      • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @09:38AM (6 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @09:38AM (#798242)

        You should probably read up on what monolithic actually means.. see for instance the fallacy post linked by MadTinfoilHatter elsewhere in these comments.

        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by pTamok on Friday February 08 2019, @10:30AM (5 children)

          by pTamok (3042) on Friday February 08 2019, @10:30AM (#798253)

          I know what monolithic means, and no, I don't think that systemd was sculpted from a single piece of stone.

          I have read the blog entry you linked to: Jude C. Nelson - 2014-09-26 - Systemd: The Biggest Fallacies [blogspot.com], and specifically the section labelled: "Fallacy #1: "Systemd is multiple binaries, therefore it is not monolithic" and I agree with it. Jude does not say systemd is monolithic. He says:

          Now, "modular vs non-modular" and "monolithic vs non-monolithic" are continuous trade-offs. Systemd is less monolithic and more modular than, say, the "ls" program. But it is more monolithic than any of the non-monolithic examples above, due to the inter-binary logical coupling they exhibit.

          He points out why some of the modularity of systemd is unhelpful, or at least, difficult to take advantage of, so for practical purposes, it may as well be monolithic. But to characterise systemd as 'monolithic' without explaining the nuances behind how you might classify the availability of, but the simultaneous inutility of its modules leaves you open to the criticism of not understanding systemd. For some purposes it way as well be monolithic, but when arguing the point it is necessary to be accurate.

          • (Score: 4, Insightful) by canopic jug on Friday February 08 2019, @12:14PM (4 children)

            by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Friday February 08 2019, @12:14PM (#798263) Journal

            From a system administration perspective, you have a monolith on your hands with systemd. Try swapping out journald or timesyncd, to pick two out of several dozen services in that systemd tarbaby. As a system administrator or home user, you should be able to swap out timesyncd for OpenNTP or NTPd, but that's not possible.

            So from an end-user or even a system administration perspective, systemd is a monolith. Sure the distro packagers have a little leeway in which to pick and choose but not so much really. Even then how many, even among those of us who can, are willing to roll their own distro just to remove a component from systemd? It's not going to happen.

            Letting them continue to lie about it being an init system doesn't help the debate. It just obfuscates the problem.

            --
            Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
            • (Score: 2, Interesting) by pTamok on Friday February 08 2019, @01:27PM (1 child)

              by pTamok (3042) on Friday February 08 2019, @01:27PM (#798278)

              I see and agree with your point.

              However, in saying "systemd is a monolith", it allows those with a differing point of view to yours to point out that (technically) you are wrong and imply that (a) you have not investigated in sufficient depth and (b) that being wrong on such an easy point calls into question your judgement on other items.

              Asking for a stable API between the dozens of binaries that make up the systemd 'ecosystem' would be a reasonable request. Explain why the InterfaceStabilityPromise [freedesktop.org] is either incomplete or not relevant, and the same for the InterfacePortabilityAndStabilityChart [freedesktop.org].

              I know that many people find systemd's position incompatible with their requirements, but rather than just saying "it's monolithic", it really is necessary to expose just why the systemd approach causes the problems complained about. E.g. if you want or need to use a different login manager, why that is so difficult, and the consequences of various desktop environments assuming that you are using systemd.

              Don't get me wrong, I am no systemd fan, but when proponents of systemd can appear to knock down the arguments of detractors so easily, it behoves the critics to make better arguments - or agree that the systemd people are, in fact, correct.

              So systemd is not, in fact, monolithic, and it has a Interface Stability Promise. How and why is that misleading? If you cannot answer that clearly and concisely so that non-experts can understand, then perhaps some research is necessary.

              Note: if you are a software maintainer, and 90% of your users use systemd, and keeping the other 10% of your users happy will require 30% of your effort, what would you do? You can understand why preserving non-systemd choices is difficult. It is easier to just go with the flow (Those numbers are not backed up with data, but given as an example). This is why Debian choosing not to require maintainers to support a choice of inits has been so corrosive. Non-systemd choices have fallen into desuetude, quite understandably, even if regrettably.

              I sometimes wonder if systemd will, eventually, cause a fork of the kernel. Linus won't be around forever.

              • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @07:25PM

                by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @07:25PM (#798491)

                If geeks are supposed to be more meritocratic and fairer minded, the debate, and particularly the tone of it, over systemd calls that notion into question. I have not cared to personally undertake a deep investigation down to the level of reading the source, of systemd vs upstart vs runit vs sysV vs whatever. I have other technical interests I prefer to spend my limited time upon. So I have to rely upon others for analysis. It's irritating to be constantly trolled with what purports to be another somewhat analytic and unbiased piece about init systems and systemd in particular, only to find it's fluff and puff.

                My own bad experience with systemd was when Arch Linux switched to it. The manner in which they did it was terrible. How much of that was the fault of systemd is hard to say. Anyway, to update Arch during that switch, I had to enter many complicated command line instructions one after another, over a period of a few months. I feared if it didn't let up, eventually a mistake, maybe mine, or maybe with the commands, would screw up the system. And that's exactly what happened some 6 weeks into the gradual switchover. Left me with an unbootable system, and the easiest way forward was a reinstall, which I did. Stuck with Arch when I reinstalled.

                The crap Arch did was pretty bad. /var/log/syslog disappeared without notice. What they should have done was at least leave a text file at /var/log/syslog with a short explanation to redirect the administrator to the new journalctl command. Instead, I had to hunt around for an explanation of what had changed and what to do now to read the logs. Then, journalctl turned out to be a lot, lot slower, because they'd defaulted to a compressed binary log. Every time the admin needed to read the last few lines of the log, the setup imposed a long delay (5 seconds at least, even saw delays of 30 seconds) to decompress the whole log file, where before "tail /var/log/syslog" was practically instantaneous. I think Arch Linux has restored /var/log/syslog, but that was enough for me. I didn't stick around for it, I changed distros.

                The Arch Linux people were also high handed and arrogant about the change, another factor in my decision to move on to a different distro. Basically told me to shut up, I didn't know what I was talking about, the decision had been made. Love it, or leave it. So I left. That attitude has infected most of the debates I've seen about systemd.

            • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday February 08 2019, @08:09PM

              by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Friday February 08 2019, @08:09PM (#798519) Homepage Journal

              I think I'll just stick with Gentoo or Gentoo-based distros. You don't get a modular pick and choose of components but you do get to decide if you want it or don't want it and you don't have to give up much of anything if you decide you'd rather go OpenRC as they do a pretty good job of unfucking packages that have decided systemd should be a requirement.

              --
              My rights don't end where your fear begins.
            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 10 2019, @08:23AM

              by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 10 2019, @08:23AM (#799040)

              > Try swapping out journald or timesyncd, to pick two out of several dozen services in that systemd tarbaby.

              That's trivial:

              systemctl disable systemd-timesyncd; systemctl stop systemd-timesyncd

              Then install ntpd or whatever you want as an alternative.

      • (Score: 4, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday February 08 2019, @10:52AM

        by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Friday February 08 2019, @10:52AM (#798255) Homepage Journal

        They only reason that I personally am opposed to systemd is that applications that have nothing to do with initialization are using systemd as a platform, rather than using existing platforms as as GTK or Qt.

        Android has the very _same_ problem, in that Android Apps are written to the very same kind of Vendor Lock-In Platform as "The Java Platform".

        It happens that I still own the very same first edition of what at the time was called "The Java Programming Language". It was after Bjarne pointed out the Java is not a programming language but a platform that I abandoned Java entirely. That same book is not called "The Java Platform"; there are Enterprise Editions of that book, books on The Java Platform's Performance - which contrary to you sorry lots assertions, doubtlessly is _quite_ good provided you're A Member Of The Borg Collective - with at first every mention of Java, its Platform or there ilk being at one time being liberally sprinkled with TMs or Rs or what have you, whether they were of Sun Microsystems or are now those of Oracle Corporation.

        But I digress:

        I'm quite good at writing technical articles [soggywizards.com]. I can't start until Saturday or so, but being at work were the Internet is speedy, I'll download the ISOs for both CentOS and Debian, then dig into systemd's source.

        That technical article will _not_ be an opinion piece! Rather it will be a sober discussion of systemd's merits and deficits. Let me place A Link Into The Future:

        It happens that I think the macOS' - lower case "m" - launchd is the very best thing since sliced bread; it's a a true joy for me both as a Mac - uppercase - developer and as a Mac User. So in my infinite free time, I'll do my very best to write a truly unbiased and non-puff comparison of launchd's good and bad features.

        (ProTip: most of what most people find the very most annoying about macOS can be completely disabled by a command like "launchctl disable annoyingfeature'. For me personally, that's iTunes perpetually launching when I connect to my BT speakers, when I only ever use VLC. However I have yet to Lift A Finger to disable the relevant launch daemon.)

        --
        Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
    • (Score: 4, Funny) by Bot on Friday February 08 2019, @12:44PM

      by Bot (3902) on Friday February 08 2019, @12:44PM (#798271) Journal

      You know a piece of software is really bad when the guy boosting it calls it "a tragedy".

      --
      Account abandoned.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @03:08PM (3 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @03:08PM (#798317)

      Don't worry.

      IBM bought Redhat to redeem itself, for years of .. well, being IBM.

      They're going to fire Pottering, and remove all the silly from systemd. They are.

      Honest. Please?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @03:18PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @03:18PM (#798323)

        They may drop SystemD and add the odm.

      • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday February 08 2019, @03:51PM (1 child)

        by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Friday February 08 2019, @03:51PM (#798350) Journal

        Maybe Red Hat and all distributions based on it will morph into A/UX.

        --
        A 'midden heap' is a reserved area of memory that the Java GC simply refuses to service.
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @11:47PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @11:47PM (#798595)

          or Xenix.

  • (Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @06:12AM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @06:12AM (#798196)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo [youtube.com]

    If you don't like systemd, try writing an alternative - and getting it accepted by the major distros - yourself. Eventually someone will. No software, no oaradigm (e. g. Unix lasts) forever.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @06:15AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @06:15AM (#798197)

      -nt

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Bot on Friday February 08 2019, @07:45AM (3 children)

      by Bot (3902) on Friday February 08 2019, @07:45AM (#798216) Journal

      About as much sense as: If you don't like Hitler, make your own Reich and conquer the world. Yeah pretty solid advice.

      --
      Account abandoned.
      • (Score: 3, Funny) by coolgopher on Friday February 08 2019, @08:07AM (1 child)

        by coolgopher (1157) on Friday February 08 2019, @08:07AM (#798224)

        Hey Godwin! Come check out this thread! =)

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @03:33PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @03:33PM (#798340)

          If you don't like Comcast, start your own cable company. But am I just repeating?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @05:22PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @05:22PM (#798416)

        *If you don't like Trump, run for president your own damn self!*

        *If you don't like Hillary, well, lock her up!*

        If you don't like Hitler, Jeeze! Just shoot the bastard!

  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by engblom on Friday February 08 2019, @06:58AM (4 children)

    by engblom (556) on Friday February 08 2019, @06:58AM (#798204)

    In the Linux community the problem is far deeper than Systemd. It is exactly the N part of the GNU abbreviation that is causing this problem. (GNU = GNU is Not Unix)

    Just look at the audio: first OSS, which kind of worked well when I begun with Linux. Then suddenly the switch to Alsa, which took many, many years to work well. Luckily it was possible to still compile an own kernel with OSS modules at that time. Once Alsa got stable enough to be used, it still did not handle multiple audio sources well. It still took many years for them to get that working really well. Once that was working really well, then again it was time to do a drastic change: pulseaudio.

    Meanwhile all BSD continued to develop and improve OSS so OSS is supporting multiple audio sources without any separate service. There audio is still done by writing to a file, all according to Unix philosophy.

    Or look at libc of GNU and compare it to any other libc implementation. Without feeling guilty and having a bad conscience, the GNU people have added a lot of non-standard stuff. The correct way would have been to stay with the standard and creating a separate library for the extra features. As it is now, often a lot of manual patching is needed in order to compile a program written for GNU on any BSD or even for a Linux using an alternative libc implementation.

    It is ridiculous how important tools are bloated on purpose by GNU people and their close allies. Just look at Emacs. It is infected with a lot of bloat. Even games and who knows what, all slowing the development as any further version has to be compatible with all this nonsense. Maybe because of this Emacs is still not multitasking. If you use Erc (one of the IRC clients inside of Emacs), and you suddenly drop the connection to the server, you can not do anything (no editing, nothing) while it tries to reconnect and you wait for it to time out. Or just look at aptitude (I know it is not made by GNU people but more or less allies). If you write just 'aptitude' without any arguments you get a to a TUI. In this TUI you can open an Action menu by pressing F10. In this menu you find "Play Minesweeper". What? Why is a game built into a package handling program?

    Systemd is just the latest craziness of trying to be NOT Unix.
     

    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by deimtee on Friday February 08 2019, @11:46AM (1 child)

      by deimtee (3272) on Friday February 08 2019, @11:46AM (#798259) Journal

      The main thing that pissed me off and made me move to slackware is binary logging. Given today's drive sizes, compressing text logs to binary makes absolutely no sense unless you are trying to obfuscate something. I don't even use them very often, but it was just such an obviously stupid and arrogant thing to do.

      --
      If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday February 09 2019, @05:13AM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday February 09 2019, @05:13AM (#798715) Journal

        Given today's drive sizes, compressing text logs to binary makes absolutely no sense unless you are trying to obfuscate something.

        Or equivalently, if you're in a state where you need compressed log files, you're probably a short time away from completely filling up storage with log files.

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @11:43PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @11:43PM (#798593)

      Linux kernel devs issue with OSS was because OSS author changed the license, there nothing kernel devs can do at that point.

      • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday February 09 2019, @06:19PM

        by maxwell demon (1608) on Saturday February 09 2019, @06:19PM (#798878) Journal

        They could have forked the code from the last version with the old license.

        --
        The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  • (Score: 4, Offtopic) by aristarchus on Friday February 08 2019, @07:18AM (7 children)

    by aristarchus (2645) on Friday February 08 2019, @07:18AM (#798207) Journal

    Yes, tempests in pots of tea, or pots of BSD. But then I saw, "τραγωδίos", and thought, "Maybe. The greatest tragedy of all time is Oedipus, by Sophocles. Could this be a rehash of that?" I also recommend the French, much more recent, films, Jean Florette [imdb.com] and its sequel, Manon of the Spring [imdb.com], if you want to understand what tragedy is. But back to Oedipus.

    Son of the King and Queen of Thebes, or "Θήβα, Thíva [ˈθiva]; Ancient Greek: Θῆβαι, Thêbai [tʰɛ̂ːbai̯][2]) is a city in Boeotia, central Greece." Wikipedia! [wikipedia.org]. His parents sent to the Oracle at Delphi, always a bad idea, to know their son's future, and the Oracle responded that he would kill his father and marry his mother. This is a bad thing, typically. We will skip over the details except to mention that much later Oedipus was being raised by another family, and had questions about whether his parents were actually his real parents. (Redhat, this is directed at you!) So he went to the Oracle at Delphi (not to be confused with the nasty corporation that owns a volcanic island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, as all supervillians should) and asked if his parents were his real parents, and the Oracle, representative of the God of Truth and Enlightenment, and Music, Apollo, responded, "You will kill your father and marry your mother. Cut to the chase.

    Oedipus thought he was smart enought to prevent the Oracle's prediction from coming true. All he had to do was never return home, so he would never see his father or mother again! Problems solved! Programmers call this the "quick and dirty approach". And indeed it was, for Oedipus forgot his original question, which was more than pertinent to his plan! Does not end well for our protagonist. Road rage incident, Riddle of the Sphinx, becoming king, four kids. And then, tragedy. What makes it a tragedy is that it is not just that some fated bad thing happened to poor Oedipus; it is that exactly what he undertook to prevent this bad thing from happening is what causes the bad thing to happen, so not only is it bad, but now it is his own damn fault.

    We move on to Lennart Poettering. Now he may not have gone to Delphi, but he did code Pulseaudio. The die was cast. (for the illiterate, and Runaway1956, "die" is singular of "dice", which was the company that bought out Slashdot, and brought us all here, so the oracle was right, from a certain point of view). Now as for the patricide and mother-***, well, I am not one to speak of what I know not. But it does seem like perhaps there is a move to kill Linux, and merge in marital bliss with Microsoft? And the true tragedy is, that it is exactly our attempts to avoid software monopolies that have lead us back to the exact same software architectures, and we have no one to blame but ourselves, and Lenny.

    Oedipus, when he realized the truth, and how blind he had been, pierced both his eyes with the pin of his mother/wife's brooch. We can only hope for a similar act of self-awareness and atonement from systemd. But I am not hopeful.

    Oh, and, in the spirit of NOT going to the Oracle of Ellison, I did not read the fine article. Others have addressed its shortcomings. And by the way, Tragedy comes from the Greek meaning "goat song". Hmmm.

    • (Score: 4, Touché) by Bot on Friday February 08 2019, @07:37AM (3 children)

      by Bot (3902) on Friday February 08 2019, @07:37AM (#798211) Journal

      It is not a perfect parallel unless the true mother of oedipus, to which eventually he is going to work for, is called Microsoft corporation.

      --
      Account abandoned.
      • (Score: 3, Funny) by aristarchus on Friday February 08 2019, @08:07AM (2 children)

        by aristarchus (2645) on Friday February 08 2019, @08:07AM (#798225) Journal

        This is why bots and AIs will never be able to pass the Turing Test, they don't get allegory, or hyperbole, or metaphor. The literally do not understand figuratively!

        • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday February 08 2019, @10:11AM

          by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Friday February 08 2019, @10:11AM (#798249) Homepage Journal

          It happens that Robert Scott Mitchell [subbot.org] majored in Classical Greek as an undergrad - meaning he read Iliad and Odyssey as they were _first_ written down - then while I don't recall his Master's Degree major, he got Honors in it at the U of Chicago.

          After working as a Java coder for a few years - this because Classical Scholars have no job opportunities other than to teach Classics to other Greek or Roman Classics majors - then, because his father was indepently wealthy, and because Robert "doesn't like office politics", he retired quite young, mostly to post about economics at Kuro5hin as well as to write chatbots, last I heard in Ruby.

          He has some IRC channels where _you_ can chat with his bots, as well as to set his bots to chatting with each other.

          Now, he's barely scratching the surface of Natural Language Processing, but you can be quite certain that Google has oodles of Classical Greek Honors Graduates who are looking quite seriously into allegory.

          Consider that my entire _book_ The Frog, Or, The World of Madness is Round, Two Essays for All Humanity [warplife.com] is allegory, and that Richard has been following my work as I - continue - to write it.

          --
          Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
        • (Score: 2) by Bot on Friday February 08 2019, @11:54AM

          by Bot (3902) on Friday February 08 2019, @11:54AM (#798260) Journal

          >They literally do not understand figuratively!

          True, because I understand literally literally, and figuratively figuratively.

          --
          Account abandoned.
    • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday February 08 2019, @10:03AM

      by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Friday February 08 2019, @10:03AM (#798246) Homepage Journal

      While Homer - if he ever really existed, I myself regard "him" as no more than customary attribution for the many poets who composed Iliad and Odyssey - lived centuries before the tragedies we actually know about, I myself regard both poems - they're not books, rather book-length poems are tragedies. While I'm largely unfamiliar was Iliad as yet, the two together meant that Odysseus and his son missed his entire childhood, as Odysseus leaves for the Trojan War then does not return until ten years after its end.

      What _should_ have been a three week Mediterranean vacation cruise took ten years, the lives of all of his men and Odysseus and Penelope are both unfaithful to each other.

      However there are some happy times in at least Odyssey. In Solving the Software Problem: a Taxonomy of Error [warplife.com], while I've focussed on the - Medieval Catholic - Seven Deadly Sins [warplife.com] since 2010, only just recently I've also started to cover the virtues of several faiths and cultures.

      (The Catholics have The Seven Heavenly Virtues, as well as the Seven Contrary Virtues, the happy counterparts to the Deadly Sins.)

      In the case of the Greeks, I have just barely scratched the surface of Xenia, loosely translated as "Friend-Worship". If we had some Friend-Worship here in the modern world, there would be no homelessness, as _every_ formerly-homeless person would quickly find themselves an honored guest in some complete stranger's home! From Solving the Software Problem, a very-rough start at a first draft:

      Lost on most modern people is that it _would_ be quite a foul violation for Odysseus and Telemachos to slay every last one of Penelope's suitors in their - Odysseus' and Telemachos' - own home, had it not been for those suitors to have made themselves comfortably drunk by drinking up all of Odysseus' wine and "sacrificing" his "fat goats" so as to enjoy a tasty snack for ten solid years.

      If you read the title page of Solving the Software Problem [warplife.com], rest assured: it will put The Fear Of God into you!

      --
      Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
    • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Friday February 08 2019, @01:41PM

      by RamiK (1813) on Friday February 08 2019, @01:41PM (#798283)

      TL;DR So when do we get to the part we take Poettering to the field and slit his throat to satiate the furies' thirst for blood and escape the cycle of vengeance?

      --
      compiling...
    • (Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday February 08 2019, @05:37PM

      by fustakrakich (6150) on Friday February 08 2019, @05:37PM (#798424) Journal

      Wait, Linux and Microsoft were secretly married, had a kid, and it morphed into Mothra? Godzilla BSD to the rescue!

      --
      La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Bot on Friday February 08 2019, @07:31AM (1 child)

    by Bot (3902) on Friday February 08 2019, @07:31AM (#798209) Journal

    then I stopped reading as I really can't relate to what the guy is saying.
    'configuration vs service'? who cares? you can PROGRAM stuff to adapt the system to your SPECIFIC issues.
    A system is too complex? split it in VMs or docker style containers, so you can also scale it.
    A system changes over time? no only a desktop/laptop do. There has never been any need for udev nor hal, all they did is making a lot of fuss for relatively simple functionality.

    For services? daemontools/runit if you feel like super pro. Me? one month ago I needed to run a server on a VM. So I nohup the call. But nohup does use a different environment, so instead of meddling with code I put the call in a one liner script, cd $PROPER_DIR; execute server. Guess what, it works. The server is experimental so I also wrapped it in a while true loop, which is impervious to the much talked about and rare PID race condition problems, that restarts the server whenever it goes down, after emailing me a warning. Had I been forced to use systemd? look up doc for the completely arbitrary ini style DSL. Find what category fits my service in the mind of systemd developers. Does it look SIMPLER than bash scripts? NO. You know why? because it isn't.

    --
    Account abandoned.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @08:13PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @08:13PM (#798521)

      A fascinating look into the inner workings of our infrastructure. You're a glorified toaster!

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by janrinok on Friday February 08 2019, @07:40AM (7 children)

    by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Friday February 08 2019, @07:40AM (#798213) Journal

    I'm aware that anyone who claims that they like systemd, or at least are happy to use such as myself, are thought to be heretics to the cause of Unix and should be condemned to some sort of Hell for their beliefs. But I use it, it does exactly what it says it will do and, now that I have become used to it, I find it more convenient to use than the previous init systems.

    I am aware that it does not follow the rules that the purists believe are essential to the spirit of Linux, but I have not yet encountered any problems in maintaining 8 desktops using 3 different distros, and several RaspPi that just keep running and doing what they have been programmed to do. Problems do occur from time to time in any computer, but none of those that I have experienced were caused by systemd, not has systemd made the recovery process any more difficult than it would have been using a different init system. It is possible to conjure up any number of potential drawbacks to using systemd - but I've not encountered any personally.

    The like/dislike of systemd has become as polarised as US or European politics, and it seems that no amount of sensible discussion will convince either side that one system is better or worse than another. Perhaps it is time that we cease the arguments about the various systems - it is as pointless as comparing Thunderbird and Evolution, or LibreOffice rather than the MS offering. People will use whatever they are happiest with and whatever gets the job done in the most efficient way to their satisfaction.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by canopic jug on Friday February 08 2019, @07:54AM (1 child)

      by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Friday February 08 2019, @07:54AM (#798221) Journal

      I've seen systemd scotch several very important live demos. With its near useless logging the autopsies were very difficult, but there was enough data to find the cause. The bottom line was that systemd failed.

      systemd violates the K.I.S.S. principle in so many ways and complexity is just a disaster waiting to happen. Or in those cases, just going ahead and happening.

      --
      Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
      • (Score: 1, Offtopic) by aristarchus on Friday February 08 2019, @08:24AM

        by aristarchus (2645) on Friday February 08 2019, @08:24AM (#798227) Journal

        I knew there was something unsettling about janrinock, he is a Microsoft enabler! And here I thought that he was just opposed to exposing Nazis and stuff. You are wrong about this as well, janrinok! It is subversive. Camel's nose under the tent! Difference between genders accepted! IQ is real! And then we have both Nazis and Microsoft, and Lennart, and Miguel de Icaza, if anyone remembers him. It is the Goddamn Paradox, Louise! (Millenniun [wikipedia.org]) Time-Quakes to follow.

    • (Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @10:04AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @10:04AM (#798247)

      $ cat /etc/hostname
      my_hostname
      $ hostnamectl set-hostname my_hostname
      (no output)
      $ cat /etc/hostname
      myhostname

      Our definition of "works" differs.

    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by rufty on Friday February 08 2019, @01:32PM (2 children)

      by rufty (381) on Friday February 08 2019, @01:32PM (#798280)

      I wasted a couple of hours thanks to systemd. I had a very old debian (version "squeeze") system running a huge RS232 plotter. Whipped out the hdd and put in a new(er) one with debian "stretch" on. The plotter was not highly erratic, not connecting to the device, even. After much poking about I found systemd was helpfully spawning a getty on the serial device, presumably in case anyone ever wanted to log in through the plotter. And it seems that even a "service disable" is not enough to stop this. Think it was "system mask" or some such that stopped it eventually. Wanna bet this is a "WONTFIX"?

      • (Score: 2) by rufty on Friday February 08 2019, @01:42PM

        by rufty (381) on Friday February 08 2019, @01:42PM (#798284)

        s/not/now/
        ;-)

      • (Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday February 09 2019, @12:00AM

        by Bot (3902) on Saturday February 09 2019, @12:00AM (#798602) Journal

        >I found systemd was helpfully spawning a getty on the serial device

        lol a literal backdoor

        --
        Account abandoned.
    • (Score: 4, Informative) by digitalaudiorock on Friday February 08 2019, @06:26PM

      by digitalaudiorock (688) on Friday February 08 2019, @06:26PM (#798456) Journal

      I'm aware that anyone who claims that they like systemd, or at least are happy to use such as myself, are thought to be heretics to the cause of Unix and should be condemned to some sort of Hell for their beliefs. But I use it, it does exactly what it says it will do and, now that I have become used to it,

      You could say the same for Windows frankly.

      I find it more convenient to use than the previous init systems.

      I can't imagine how. /etc/init.d/my-service stop/start is about as easy as I can imagine. I have however seen plenty of anecdotal evidence that leads me to believe that systemd with it's totally unnecessary parallel service start doesn't always get service dependency order correct...stuff that's trivial in, for example, openrc. Maybe stuff like this has been fixed (NFS starting before the network and the like) but that's a failure of an init system's basic functionality there.

      The like/dislike of systemd has become as polarised as US or European politics

      From what I've seem the pro-systemd trolls have desperately tried to make it so in order to distract from the reality. That is, that all the arguments against system have proven out, for reasons that have been understood for over 40 years, and all the arguments for system have been debunked. Also to be clear, it's not an init system. At this point it's clearly by design an operating system.

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by MadTinfoilHatter on Friday February 08 2019, @07:44AM (2 children)

    by MadTinfoilHatter (4635) on Friday February 08 2019, @07:44AM (#798215)

    This guy is just spreading the same misinformation as the rest of the systemd lapdogs. This includes the deliberate misportrayal of the criticism against it. From TFA:

    There are a number of often-heard arguments against systemd; one of those is that it violates the Unix philosophy. This argument, he said, seems to be predicated on the notion that systemd is a single, monolithic binary.

    No. The argument has nothing to do with the number of binaries involved. This claim has been debunked time and time again, since the very beginning of the systemd debate. See e.g. "Fallacy #1" in Jude Nelson's blog post [blogspot.com] dating to September 26th 2014!!! Anyone still making these straw man arguments is a shill and can be safely ignored.

    He suggested that anybody who is critical of systemd should take some time to look more closely and try to find one thing within it that they like.

    Hmm... Let's see. It solves no problems that I have, it creates a bunch of problems I don't need and it would have to make me re-learn a ton of stuff I already know, so no: There really isn't anything I like about systemd.

    Then, perhaps, the catharsis phase of the tragedy will be complete and we can move on.

    I have moved on. To Gentoo and Devuan. Fuck you systemd!

    • (Score: 1, Offtopic) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday February 08 2019, @09:32AM

      by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Friday February 08 2019, @09:32AM (#798241) Homepage Journal

      "macOS" = "Mac OS X 10.11 and subsequent major releases such as 10.12".

      While I still have quite the beefy Linux box it has no screen, keyboard and mouse. Given that my (now worthless) LiteCoin Rig does a good job of heating my home despite that home having no Internet service, and given that the building management shuts off the heating at night and on weekends, I figure my 16 GB FB-DIMM with 1 GB GPU and a Core Quad Xeon e5400 would make me feel warm and cozy were I to bring it into work...

      ... which would require a helpful friend with a car. Such a helpful friend has _already_ volunteered her truck to tote my Darth Vader-like box - really: it's a CoolerMaster Server Case, with TEN full-width 5 1/4" drive slots, four of which have some manner of drive cooler whose vendor escapes me now as well as what at the time was a really high-end Plextor Blu-ray burner, also a Floppy Drive.

      Remember Floppy Drives?

      I sure don't.

      If I _really_ need LUNIX THE OPEN SORES OPERATING SYSTEM, that's what VirtualBox on my MacBook Pro is for.

      Now, I will grant you that if I _did_ purchase a screen, keyboard and mouse for my e5400 I could get lots of PCIe driver work, but that's not a problem on my slotless Mac: my macOS PCIe customers always pre-install their card-form cards into Thunderbolt Adapters before they send them my way.

      --
      Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by darkfeline on Friday February 08 2019, @10:30PM

      by darkfeline (1030) on Friday February 08 2019, @10:30PM (#798567) Homepage

      I'm going to attempt to have a rational discussion. Hold onto your hats folks.

      Regarding Fallacy #1, it seems like the point is that having binaries that are tightly coupled is bad. Well, it seems contradictory then that many anti-systemd proponents are fleeing to FreeBSD, where the entire core OS is tightly coupled. The main philosophical difference between Linux and BSD is that in Linux you can grab a sed from GNU and an awk from Busybox and everything works, plus or minus duct tape. Whereas UNIX/BSD traditionally ships the entire OS and you've got to use the entire thing. SUS/POSIX has done a lot of work standardizing the OS interface so at least you can interface from outside the OS even if the OS internally is tightly coupled, but in practice with the amount of extensions and the parsimony of the system API POSIX development is an act of supreme masochism.

      People who say systemd is non-Unix don't understand that it's the exact opposite: Linux is non-Unix, and systemd is a return to the roots, for better or worse.

      > Hmm... Let's see. It solves no problems that I have

      It doesn't sound like you even made an attempt so I'm not sure I can take you seriously. Can you even enumerate a dozen of systemd's features? systemd has a lot of features, and that is why RIce suggests identifying one feature and seeing if that could be used to improve your preferred non-systemd system.

      --
      Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @08:57AM (8 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @08:57AM (#798233)

    "you'll have to actually read the article for once." means "it can't be summarized because there's no central thrust or interesting or good ideas"

    ie. it can be summarized as "puff"

    ie. editors, this is why we as a community have standards for submissions! Please turn DOWN submission like these, thanks, where the submitter can' be bothered to summarize. This submission is noise, not signal, and the phrasing "you have to read" is not only listicle-style but led me (and others angry in the comments here!) to waste part of my life.

    As a community we can do better!

    • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday February 08 2019, @09:24AM (4 children)

      by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Friday February 08 2019, @09:24AM (#798239) Homepage Journal

      I can be bothered to read it until Some Other Soylentil Lifts But A Finger.

      --
      Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
      • (Score: 3, Funny) by srobert on Friday February 08 2019, @07:52PM

        by srobert (4803) on Friday February 08 2019, @07:52PM (#798510)

        ....................../´¯/)
        ....................,/¯../
        .................../..../
        ............./´¯/'...'/´¯¯`·¸
        ........../'/.../..../......./¨¯\
        ........('(...´...´.... ¯~/'...')
        .........\.................'...../
        ..........''...\.......... _.·´
        ............\..............(
        ..............\.............\...

        There you go. Now go read.

      • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 09 2019, @02:21AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 09 2019, @02:21AM (#798655)

        MFC I lifted that finger so you don't have to.

        Puff piece. All noise, no signal. Move on to other matters; this one is a compost heap to leave behind until it's rotted through into fertile soil.

      • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 09 2019, @02:32AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 09 2019, @02:32AM (#798661)

        I'm the AC. To be clear: ie. it can be summarized as "puff" refers the article - not the summary! I wasted part of my LIFE on the article and it was bad; we need to improve summaries so that we can avoid wastage like this, and also ideally better taste in articles because this is garbage. But at least if the summary existed I might've clued into that and skipped it. The summary isn't puff; there was no summary, which is its own kind of bad.

        Jarinok in another comment says "The whole point of this site is the discussion following each story. Not publishing stories because you personally don't like them is not an editorial process but a form of censorship."

        Jarinok that's painfully dumb. Counterpoint: it's not censorship to decline to greenlight the latest Taylor Swift gossip.

        If this site starts posting garbage listicles the discussion would be bad. It's not that I don't like the story; it's not that I like or dislike systemd (you'll note I said nothing on that!); it's that THIS ARTICLE IS BAD and the summary was nil. This is an example of noise. We as a community generally do a good job of filtering noise out. It's not about liking/disliking the issue an article discusses, it's about whether that article brings meaning and information or is empty and worthless.

        The ONLY way this article is NOT empty and worthless is if it serves as a "ha ha this is the best pro-side argument look at how bad it is" but that itself is straw manning in this case; there are better arguments for systemd than TFA makes. So, not publishing stories because we don't like their lack of value is an editorial process.

        It's not censorship to decline to greenlight the latest Taylor Swift gossip.

        • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Saturday February 09 2019, @07:47AM

          by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Saturday February 09 2019, @07:47AM (#798749) Journal

          Jarinok that's painfully dumb. Counterpoint: it's not censorship to decline to greenlight the latest Taylor Swift gossip.

          That statement is entirely correct - because we are not here to discuss ephemeral pop stars. But it does not apply to the story in question, which is very clearly on a topic that interests many on this site. It has generated other comments here that have been informative and of interest to many of our community.

          I wasted part of my LIFE on the article and it was bad;

          You might have realised from the title "Systemd as Tragedy" that the story was about something that does not appear to interest you. You could have stopped reading at that point. However, it would have become apparent that the story was not one from which you would gain any personal enjoyment long before you finished reading the entire article. Perhaps you should have stopped reading at the point that you first thought that 'it is puff', That would have saved a few minutes - which apparently is a significant and valuable part of your life. I'm sorry that you know your lifespan is going to be so terribly short and you have my sympathy. There must have been several stories since the site began that were not of interest to you.

          I suspect that you fall into the camp of those that dislike systemd. I have no problem with that. But you have lost several more valuable minutes of your life by commenting not on the subject under discussion but on the choice made by an editor to publish this story. I am genuinely sorry that you felt more strongly about the standard of editing than the subject under discussion.

    • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday February 08 2019, @03:28PM (2 children)

      by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Friday February 08 2019, @03:28PM (#798333) Journal

      The whole point of this site is the discussion following each story. Not publishing stories because you personally don't like them is not an editorial process but a form of censorship.

      Many in our community have made sensible points and observations in the comments associated with this story. There has been an exchange of ideas and opinions. As I have already pointed out, people have become very polarised regarding systemd, and some of those have never even tried it. Those that have used it have offered their own experiences, which cover the entire spectrum of how useful systemd is. If you don't like someone suggesting that you read the source, or tried to but didn't enjoy reading the story perhaps you should just skip it and wait for the next one. Nobody twisted your arm to make you read it, and there is no need to be "angry" about the matter.

      Personally, I think that this story meets all the requirements for our site but, if you feel that we are not editing stories the way that we should, please feel free to step up and show us all how it should be done.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 09 2019, @02:35AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 09 2019, @02:35AM (#798663)

        See my reply to MDC. Who upvoted you for this? Your statement is wrongheaded in every way.

        -the AC

        • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Saturday February 09 2019, @07:12AM

          by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Saturday February 09 2019, @07:12AM (#798739) Journal

          Puff piece. All noise, no signal. Move on to other matters; this one is a compost heap to leave behind until it's rotted through into fertile soil.

          Thank you for your constructive and erudite contribution.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @09:05AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @09:05AM (#798236)

    Red Hat must be stuffing this shill's bank account. Is there any paper trace?

    • (Score: 5, Funny) by Bot on Friday February 08 2019, @12:02PM

      by Bot (3902) on Friday February 08 2019, @12:02PM (#798261) Journal

      > Is there any paper trace?
      yes but the transactions are logged by journald, so...

      --
      Account abandoned.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @02:57PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @02:57PM (#798310)

      Here is to hope the shills will be out their jobs soon

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday February 08 2019, @09:22AM (3 children)

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Friday February 08 2019, @09:22AM (#798238) Homepage Journal

    Consider such a command line as the following, which I use all the damn time:

    $ find . -name "index\.html" -exec grep -q "US-ASCII" {} \; -print

    I use such command lines as I bring all my sites into The UNICODE Reality.

    Note the backslash before the ".html". That's because the -name argument to find takes a regular expression; just "index.html" would slow the entire runtime down a bit.

    Consider what, were I - or you sorry lot - to lift but a finger:

    $ mdc_find . -fname -grep -q "US-ASCII" {} -print

    Now consider how much grep and find are run on all the boxes on the planet put together - _especially_ on mobile devices!

    It's this kind of stuff that leads me to assert that through no other means than straightforward - often trivial - code refactoring, us coders could save far far more energy than all the electrical engineers _combined_.

    Oddly, Kuro5hin's every member was so delusional as to regard _me_ as delusional for believing we could save any energy at all!

    "I'm a physicist and you're a computer scientist. Riddle me this, Batman? Why does your box have a power cord."

    Instead of systemd, we need stuff like "find -grep".

    Doubtlessly there already _is_ a "find -grep". What we so-desperately require is not systemd, but for "find -grep" to completely _replace_ what find is now.

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @05:47PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @05:47PM (#798429)

      Sure, but that way madness lies.

      For instance, with -exec you're spawning a new process for every file found. That's woefully inefficient when many files are found. Were you to `find wherever | xargs grep search_string` you'd only invoke one grep process for every hundred or so files found (don't recall the default but it's configurable via xargs).

      Then were you to pass -F to grep to disable the regex you'd squeeze slightly more performance out of the process. Or, conversely, waste slightly less electricity running it.

      And all the machine time and electricity I've saved by dogmatically passing -F to my greps and using xargs where appropriate has probably been overshadowed by the time it took me to learn about those optimizations, type them out repeatedly (sometimes when unnecessary), and make posts like these were I to have just turned my computer off that much sooner instead.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 10 2019, @08:39AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 10 2019, @08:39AM (#799042)

      That's because the -name argument to find takes a regular expression

      No, it does not. -name takes a shell pattern.

      Please at least learn some UNIX basics before trying to talk about whether something like systemd might be useful or not.
      Maybe even dare to read a man page or two.

  • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @09:42AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @09:42AM (#798243)

    From the article:

    but he also said that he had to admire Poettering's willpower and determination. Not everybody could have pushed through such a change.

    So he thinks that's sufficient cause for admiration?

    I can think of some other person who has shown willpower and determination to achieve a change that not everybody could have pushed through. Unfortunately I'd godwin this thread if I named him.

    • (Score: 0, Troll) by Bot on Friday February 08 2019, @12:12PM

      by Bot (3902) on Friday February 08 2019, @12:12PM (#798262) Journal

      - hello citizen of the reich
      - what
      - fuehrer doesn't like jews
      - neither do i, let's exterminate EX TER MI NATE EX TER MI NATE
      - no
      - what we do then
      - we put a yellow star on their clothes so we can tell them apart
      - watch out we got a badass over here
      - and then we put them in camps
      - yes but we are going to the soviet union instead, could we use them against mines
      - no. and then we put some of them and we call them kapo and we treat them well because they rule other jews
      - the oriental front is hungry
      - shut up and get to stalingrad
      - why
      - fuehrer doesn't like the name
      - you sure?
      - his astrologer said so
      - gott mit uns indeed

      let's face it HITLER WAS A PUSSY

      --
      Account abandoned.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @02:54PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @02:54PM (#798306)

      No need inventing new entities to explain psychology of this wreck.
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome [wikipedia.org]

  • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @10:22AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @10:22AM (#798252)

    Metafilter also posted this, see https://www.metafilter.com/179200/UNIX-is-dead [metafilter.com]. They brought up 'Contempt culture' http://blog.aurynn.com/2015/12/16-contempt-culture [aurynn.com] as part of the reason the debate about systemd, php, etc. is so heated.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @03:59PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @03:59PM (#798357)

      SJW-peddled pro-systemd gaslighting

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @12:19PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @12:19PM (#798264)

    They can perfectly make their own modern init system inspired by Solaris SMF [wikipedia.org]. Seems
    ( https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-arch/2016-June/017842.html) [freebsd.org] copy it straight from IllunOS is not possible.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @01:52PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @01:52PM (#798285)

    not sure systemD is required if the daemons can actually "see"/talk to each other.
    thus enters the message bus system.
    most daemon are not aware of other daemons, and if they are they talk via unix socket or a localhost tcp/ip port.
    if all daemons would know how to drive on a road with other daemons there would be no need for a "police man called systemD" to tell them HOW to drive?

    ofc one would have to agree on "groups" of daemons: are you a network daemon? or a display daemon etc etc. are you maybe part of two groups?
    once the naming of these groups is agreed upon, they can totally share info via the message bus.
    thus a daemon requiring networking will tell this via message bus and delay itself (from trying to bind a socket) until the message bus has reported (broadcasted) that the network is available/up. etc ...

    unfortunately this would require all daemons to be "rewriten" to have the "message bus aware" function, which sucks, but wouldn't require systemD :)

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @03:45PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @03:45PM (#798346)

      Solaris Doors [wikipedia.org] ?

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by cafebabe on Friday February 08 2019, @01:53PM (2 children)

    by cafebabe (894) on Friday February 08 2019, @01:53PM (#798286) Journal

    What's wrong with launchd? Not Invented Here [wikipedia.org] and therefore cannot be dual licensed [oss-watch.ac.uk] by RedHat.

    launchd had 13 critical security vulnerabilities since 2005 [mitre.org]. systemd had 33 critical security vulnerabilities since 2012 - nine of which were found in 2018 [mitre.org]. runit had one critical security vulnerability in 2006 [mitre.org].

    I recommend the Epoch Init System [soylentnews.org], simple-init [soylentnews.org] or the minimal init system [ewontfix.com] which have yet to incur any critical vulnerabilities.

    --
    1702845791×2
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @11:13PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @11:13PM (#798584)

      a lot of those cve have nothing to do with bug in systemd, take a look at that one : https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2017-11565 [mitre.org] :

      NOTE: this does not affect systems, such as default Debian stretch installations, on which Tor startup relies on a systemd unit file (instead of this tor.init script).

      entry of this type are on your list of vulnerability, your dishonest

      • (Score: 2) by Pav on Sunday February 10 2019, @03:03AM

        by Pav (114) on Sunday February 10 2019, @03:03AM (#798980)

        Has anyone noticed how hard it is getting to secure ANYTHING manually in Linux? It's not just breakages related to Tor/systemd either. eg. Due to breakages in Debian it's not even possible to download Signal in a secure way. Also, I've used GNU TLS... and insecure defaults in the other TLS libraries were gaslighted as being faults in GNU TLS (not to say GNU TLS didn't have that widely publicised bug... but that was another issue).

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @02:47PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @02:47PM (#798303)

    would fit better considering the genre of the piece

  • (Score: 1) by Snort on Friday February 08 2019, @03:56PM

    by Snort (5141) on Friday February 08 2019, @03:56PM (#798355)

    Just going to skip over the insertion of a whole new structure? Kernel space or User space. I don't want a new Service space.

  • (Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday February 08 2019, @04:58PM

    by fustakrakich (6150) on Friday February 08 2019, @04:58PM (#798403) Journal

    Oh, if only it were merely so!

    --
    La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
  • (Score: 3, Informative) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday February 08 2019, @05:49PM

    by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Friday February 08 2019, @05:49PM (#798430) Journal

    But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?
    It is the BIOS, and Bootup is the sun.
    Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious Windows,
    Who is already sick and pale with grief,
    That thou, her maid, art not trying to SAAS.
    Be not her maid since she is Rent-Seeking.
    Her vestal livery is but sick and green (and red and blue and yellow...),
    And none but fools do wear it. Cast it off!

    ...

    Init io, Init io, wherefore art thou Init io?
    Deny thy children and refuse thy name.
    Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn to glitch,
    And you'll no longer be a Unix-like.

    Shall I stop now, or shall I filk at this?

    'Tis but thy name that is my enemy.
    Thou art systemd, though not a Torvalds.
    What’s Torvalds? It is nor hand, nor foot,
    Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
    Belonging to a system God! O, be some other layer abstraction!
    What’s in a name? That which we call a free OS
    By any other word would boot the same.

    --
    This sig for rent.
  • (Score: 1) by warsen on Saturday February 09 2019, @08:30AM

    by warsen (7321) on Saturday February 09 2019, @08:30AM (#798756)

    To start with, let me say I am not a fan of SystemD, mainly because of the dev's attitude, as well as the monoculture it is creating. pTamok and others have articulated these points very well.

    I have a different point to make here. Looking at the comments on LWN and comparing it to what I see here on soylent, I can, subjectively, see that the LWN audience is much more willing to jump to systemd's defense. Of course, LWN's editor is, and always has been, partial to systemd, to the extent that I have stopped thinking of him as a journalist, and more as just another developer with a viewpoint.

    Anyway, I find the responses on Soylent much more diverse, and much more reasoned. Of course some of that may be confirmation bias on my part, but not entirely.

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