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A developer affiliated with boycottsystemd.org has announced and released a fork of systemd, sardonically named uselessd.
The gist of it:
uselessd (the useless daemon, or the daemon that uses less... depending on your viewpoint) is a project which aims to reduce systemd to a base initd, process supervisor and transactional dependency system, while minimizing intrusiveness and isolationism. Basically, it’s systemd with the superfluous stuff cut out, a (relatively) coherent idea of what it wants to be, support for non-glibc platforms and an approach that aims to minimize complicated design.
uselessd is still in its early stages and it is not recommended for regular use or system integration, but nonetheless, below is what we have thus far.
They then go on to tout being able to compile on libc implementations besides glibc, stripping out unnecessary daemons and unit classes, working without udev or the journal, replacing systemd-fsck with a service file, and early work on a FreeBSD port (though not yet running).
Responses from the wider Linux community are yet to be heard.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 21 2014, @10:32AM
if you're a delivery man and you start giving lectures on what type of tread or what type of rubber goes into the tyres, I frankly don't give a fuck about your opinion and neither should anybody else, because you're not an expert or a developer of said tyres...
You're exactly right. I am glad you are here on this site to hold the line.
We need to understand that Red hat and Lennert are all about making things better, not worse for you! Putting our trust in them is what made Linux great. Seriously, Linux = Red hat for all I care, and if Red hat says it's good, then I'm fine with it.
There's no need to worry. Just let Red hat take care of things. They're the experts.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by chris.alex.thomas on Sunday September 21 2014, @10:41AM
systemd isn't a redhat project, it's available on many distributions and at least somebody is pushing to make the system better, it's just not understandable why the system wasn't better designed in the first place, sysvinit is a batch of skeleton bones that sort of works, as long as you don't edit a lot, of change anything, but it's dumb as a bag of hammers and isn't debuggable and barely anybody knows how it works, they just know shell scripting and edit a few things here or there, it's much better to corral all of the systems under a single method of working and make the system more programatical and logical.
the benefits far outweigh any problems, that to me is clear as day...
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 21 2014, @11:46AM
while technically correct, this statement is incorrect in practice. Either you know it and you're guilty of misinformation or you don't know it and you are doing exactly what you've just told others not to do: talking out of your ass about something you don't know anything about. In both cases, as you put it so politely, STFU!!
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 21 2014, @11:59AM
>the benefits far outweigh any problems, that to me is clear as day...
If so, then why the thing needs to be pushed by hook or by crook? If it *can* outcompete the other projects, then why the propaganda campaign and the Debian farce? And why your declarations, light on facts but high on shrillness?
If systemd is competitive, then let it compete. Nobody is asking for anything more. Stop the Embrace-and-Extend, and let the so-called "benefits" become visible to the target audience.
And in meantime, the developers could maybe learn to fix the bugs. Bugreports are *really* meant not for the future historians a hundred years away; a developer fixing his bugs the same year they were reported, can do wonders to his project's stability. Red Hat people should try it sometime. ;)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Sunday September 21 2014, @12:55PM
"as long as you don't edit a lot, of change anything,"
Its a script that starts and stops executables. For 99% of situations your only change should be the executable name.
If you're trying to embrace / extend / extinguish something by turning an init system into a complete social media web 2.0 hub, or into a retro pac man game, or a desktop environment, or a complete OS within an OS, you're doing something horribly wrong. Or rephrased, if your main complaint about an init system is its hard to turn it into something else, its not a very serious concern as long as its a good init system.
"isn't debuggable and barely anybody knows how it works"
Yes, nobody in the whole world, especially in ops, can debug or understand shell scripts, LOL.
"it's just not understandable why the system wasn't better designed in the first place"
This argument never gets any detailed explanation, because its wrong. Doesn't prevent it from being stated over and over. Sometimes I've seen circular arguments where "better designed" is assumed to be the mistakes systemd is making, with no explanation why those decisions are good, just that they are good. Of course many people disagree and they've pretty much got nothin.
"it's much better to corral all of the systems under a single method of working and make the system more programatical and logical."
That would be trivial and in fact a really good idea to abstract out into a library / subroutine. That has nothing to do with embrace / extend / extinguish everything else systemd does. There is a huge cultural problem where theres an utter fixation on running cruder less competent shells than bash because they're microscopically faster or microscopically more portable. So there's a huge push (at least in Debian and some other distros) away from bash and toward dash etc. This is of course a huge waste of time and is also controversial. Of course dash isn't all that much more advanced than dash, but its at least a little better. In summary, yeah, re-implement most of sysvinit in bash (or gasp, python?) with some decent modularization / libraries / functions / subroutines instead of cut n paste, and the whole world will be microscopically happier.
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Sunday September 21 2014, @07:53PM
There isn't much to debug and that's the idea. In my /etc/init.d/rc, I found:-
and likewise for killing stuff.
If you don't understand symlinks, shell scripts and/or globbing, you shouldn't be be doing any major system administration. This stuff exists whether or not it is in your init system.
1702845791×2
(Score: 2) by cykros on Sunday September 21 2014, @08:34PM
it's much better to corral all of the systems under a single method of working and make the system more programatical and logical
I can't decide whether to accuse you of being the borg or Sauron. Since when was monoculture the Linux (or hell, the Unix) way?
Sysvinit was never the only init option available, and people have always had alternatives there were in use, from BSD init to runit to upstart, and now we have systemd as another alternative (runit is quite dead by now, but I hear it was nice while it lasted). Open source means YOU get to decide what code runs on your box, and YOU can change it if you'd like it do be different. And furthermore, you can change it an package it so that other people can make use of your changes too. How you can jump from that to "one system under a single method" is a bit of a head scratcher though. Sounds a bit like Windows.
(Score: 1) by Robert Moonen on Tuesday September 23 2014, @12:45PM
"Better designed in the first place", hrmm. Well SysVinit is one of the early Unix system start up script systems and it worked so well that it was adopted for nearly 45 years by its protoge linux. The System 5 init script was designed to supercede some earlier unix init systems.
(Score: 2) by cykros on Sunday September 21 2014, @08:29PM
I think I'm going to have to respectfully disagree about Trusting Redhat == Making Linux Great. Not needing to take anyone at their word and being able to be in control of your system is what made Linux great, and is why even after this whole fiasco with systemd, it'll still be around. I just hope we don't see more software lock-in with programs unnecessarily requiring one init system over the other...just ask anyone who has opted for just ALSA how much they love the fact that Skype requires pulseaudio as of the latest version.
Choice is a great thing...the uproar here is because people feel like a choice was made for them without their being consulted. Was the change wrong? Not really, you can manage your distro however you like. Could it have been handled better to upset fewer users and handle things more smoothly? Absolutely. I'd say this is almost indistinguishable from when Facebook or Google add a new "feature" that you get opted into by default. Are they allowed to? Sure, they're private servers, and you don't have any kind of contract with them forbidding it, so not a problem. Can you choose to not use them? Often enough, with more ore less effort required on your part. Do people get extremely angry, generally preferring to have been asked if they wanted this new "feature" before having it thrust upon them? Always.
What the distros engaging in this behavior hopefully all asked themselves before making the changes was "Will the advantages of this new software overall outweigh the harm caused by the infuriated portions of our userbase?" If they did so, I can't hold anything against them, and it is now up to the angry users to do something to help themselves rather than continue to complain about the quality of their free handouts.