Systemd has turned into the Godzilla of Linux controversies. "Everywhere you look it's stomping through blogs, rampaging through online discussion threads, and causing white-hot flames that resemble Godzilla's own breath of death," writes Jim Lynch. Now Sam Varghese reports at iTWire that although Linus Torvalds is well-known for his strong opinions, when it comes to systemd, Torvalds is neutral. "When it comes to systemd, you may expect me to have lots of colorful opinions, and I just don't," says Torvalds. "I don't personally mind systemd, and in fact my main desktop and laptop both run it."
Oh, there's been bitter fights before. Just think about the emacs vs vi wars. Or, closer to systemd, the whole "SysV init" vs "BSD init" differences certainly ended up being things that people had "heated discussions" about. Or think about the desktop comparisons.
I'm not really sure how different the systemd brawls are from those. It's technical, but admittedly the systemd developers have also been really good at alienating people on a purely personal level too. Not that that is anything particularly new under the sun _either_: the (very) bitter wars between the GPL and the BSD license camps during late-80s and early-90s were almost certainly more about the persons involved and how they pissed off people than necessarily deeply about other differences (which existed, obviously, but still).
Torvalds was asked if systemd didn't create a single point of failure which makes a system unbootable if it fails. "I think people are digging for excuses. I mean, if that is a reason to not use a piece of software, then you shouldn't use the kernel either."
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 19 2014, @12:38PM
This should be enough to reject it right there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 19 2014, @01:55PM
Takes longer to fill up the file system.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tibman on Friday September 19 2014, @02:35PM
Current text logs are "rotated" after a period of time. During rotation they are tarred and gziped which makes them very small. Some would argue that compressed logs are as unreadable as systemd logs because an external tool is required.
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(Score: 1) by Bob The Cowboy on Saturday September 20 2014, @01:12AM
An external tool? I'm pretty sure you can find gzip and tar (log files aren't typically tar'd) on the system the compressed log file is on. And you can sure as hell find them on more systems than you can find systemd, should you need to view the log file somewhere else. You can even use pipes to send these log files to whichever viewer you like. By the way, last time I used 'less', it would automatically uncompress files to view them.
In no way is saying 'compressed text logs are as unreadable as binary logs' a fair statement. Basically any platform on earth can understand a gzip'd text file. What format is the systemd binary log written in? If someone writes a parser for it, how can they be sure it won't change in two years?
I really don't know much about systemd, and thus obviously haven't made up my mind about it, but binary logs is definitely a point against it.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Saturday September 20 2014, @05:05PM
Agreed : ) I run openRC and have little interest in systemd.
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(Score: 2) by subs on Friday September 19 2014, @03:55PM
# zfs set compress=lz4 rpool
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Arik on Friday September 19 2014, @04:14PM
No, it doesnt.
Properly configured system logs will never fill up file system. Old logs are deleted automatically long before that becomes an issue.
You can also compress the log files. Text compresses well and will be little, if any, larger than a binary log. This can be and normally is done transparently without you having to think about it.
The advantages to sane logging are numerous. In the event of a crash, the file can still be read, and that's probably the biggest one because that is the one case where you need that log the worst, and that's the one case where systemd ensures you will get no log.
And any time you need to access the logs, for whatever reason, if they are text there are dozens of high quality tools to use here. Tools that we are already familiar with. Tools that are robust and mature and well understood. But with systemd, you cannot use your own tools anymore. You MUST use their crappy log tool. Assuming you even have a log to look at anyway - which, if if you just crashed, will not be the case.
Systemd is a plague. Eradicate it. Ban Poettering from PID 1! Demand competence instead.
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