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Controversy is nothing new when it comes to systemd. Many people find this new Linux init system to be inherently flawed in most ways, yet it is still gaining traction with major distros like Arch Linux, openSUSE, Fedora, and soon both Ubuntu and Debian GNU/Linux. The adoption of systemd for Debian 8 "Jessie" has been particularly fraught with strife and animosity.
Some have described the systemd adoption process as having been a "coup", while others are vowing to stick with Debian 7 as long as possible before moving to another distro. Others are so upset by what they see as a complete betrayal of the Debian and open source communities that there is serious discussion about forking Debian. Regardless of one's stance toward systemd, it cannot be argued that it has become one of the most divisive and disruptive changes in the long history of the Debian project, threatening to destroy both the project and the community that has built up around it.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by zeigerpuppy on Sunday September 28 2014, @07:00AM
Having just commissioned a Debian 7 server (with a little of special sauce called Sid), I am very pleased with the result. 10 Xen VMs all purring away with ZFS storage with ZFSonLinux. It's totally stable and performs well. Better than that it is low maintenance. Salt and Shorewall are my friends, djbdns is excellent and bugs are well documented and traceable.
Thank you Debian, Linux and the community for a tool which makes it possible to leverage the most advanced and open software. It makes new things possible.
As for systemd, I think it's largely a solution looking for a problem. I can see the point of scheduling the order of services starting but I don't think there's a fix-it-all type of approach to this. Each server config is unique and some degree of hand tuning is inevitable.
On laptops it might make sense, but Ubuntu and Mint have that pretty nicely covered. I'll use a non systemd fork if it available but I don't see really needing to dist-upgrade for a couple of years. By which time we'll likely have something else...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 28 2014, @12:03PM
What are you going to do when Debian 7 is no longer supported?
Debian typically supports a stable distro for about a year after the subsequent stable version has been released. Jessie will be frozen on the 5th of November 2014. The release will probably be mid-2015. So it's possible that Debian 7 won't be supported by mid-2016.
Mid-2016 really isn't that far away. Is 20 months of support sufficient for your server? I would say there's a good chance it isn't, especially if it's a production server. These servers tend to hang on for many years. But serious bugs, like the ones affecting OpenSSL and bash, do come up well into this period and they need to be patched. But if your distro is no longer supported, and you have to start patching and updating libraries and programs manually because the packages are no longer available, then your distro is hindering you more than it is helping you.
Debian is a very important distro, and we need to be able to upgrade production servers from Debian 7 to Debian 8 without the fear of systemd coming along and trashing the server. That's the harm in systemd. It isn't just bad software. It's bad, unnecessary software. And it reduces the usability of Debian significantly for serious users.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 28 2014, @12:54PM
sudo apt-get remove systemd
sudo apt-get install sysvinit
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 28 2014, @01:04PM
CAUTION! CAUTION! CAUTION!
WARNING! WARNING! WARNING!
DO NOT ATTEMPT WHAT THE PARENT SUGGESTS! IT COULD DAMAGE YOUR SYSTEM!
systemd is not that easy to remove from a Debian system! That's one of the problems with systemd: it infects everything in a way that makes its removal dangerous and destructive.
SoylentNews user joshuajon posted some information about systemd removal [soylentnews.org] in other discussion.
I haven't tried the removal myself, but please read what joshuajon wrote before attempting anything on your own system that has been infected with systemd. It may just save you a lot of time and pain.
In one of his comments joshuajon mentions (emphasis added):
Please, be careful when you work with systemd. As joshuajon's comment makes clear, even the slightest misstep when dealing with systemd can render a system unable to boot!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Marand on Sunday September 28 2014, @01:26PM
If your primary problem with systemd is using it as init, you can also install the systemd-shim package and a different init of your choice. The init part of systemd is systemd-sysv, so if you install systemd + systemd-shim + sysvinit (or runit, upstart, etc.) you get a non-systemd pid1 of your choice without having to worry about half your system getting trashed over it.
Helps mitigate the "if systemd crashes your system is fucked" problem, if nothing else.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 28 2014, @07:23PM
Your comment does a great job depicting just how infectious systemd is. Even when you go out of your way not to use it, you still need to use a hack like systemd-shim, in addition to whatever real init system you want to use.
It's completely stupid that you still need to use something like systemd-shim when the whole point is to avoid systemd and the stupidity it brings!
Then the "systemd + systemd-shim + sysvinit (or runit, upstart, etc.)" setup you describes sounds far more complex and fragile than just using sysvinit alone, like we've done for so long now. Thanks, systemd, you've "solved" a problem that didn't even exist in the first place, you've made the system more fragile, and now you've created several new problems that never existed before!
systemd is a menace. It's a fucking menace. It needs to go.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Marand on Monday September 29 2014, @02:33AM
Yep, it's creeping into everything by way of a handful of packages that are basically required for a user-friendly desktop experience. Infection is a good word for it.
For what it's worth, you can still completely avoid systemd if you're careful. Just make sure you don't need power management; are willing to handle removable storage via "mount"; don't want to use GNOME3, Cinnamon, possibly MATE, etc.; and watch the deps when adding KDE apps or anything that uses Gtk3.
So far, from what I've seen, it's not really any more fragile than parts of the system relying on HAL or dbus currently. As long as the -shim package provides an abstraction to whatever systemd expects, the rest of systemd seems to plod along being an annoyance at worst, and ignorable at best. Surprisingly, the non-init parts have been less fragile for me than HAL and dbus were during their early adoption phases. The problem is that it connects too many disparate parts together into an unfathomable mass that makes debugging problems that arise daunting.
Oh, something I forgot: an extra benefit to using systemd-shim and your own int is the init part is what gives you the idiotic binary logs. Use the -shim and your own init and you keep text logs.
It doesn't need to go, it just needs better separation and interoperability with other non-systemd parts. Some parts of it could be viable alternatives to other similar software, if they didn't all require all the other parts to work. You know, like the rest of the init, logging, etc. systems.
Won't happen, though. RedHat, GNOME, and Poettering all love their not-invented-here mindset. If anybody else makes a good solution to something, one of them will re-create it their own way, tie it to GNOME, and then refuse to support anything else, eventually becoming the de facto standard through stubbornness and unwillingness to cooperate. It's happened repeatedly in the past and it's going to keep happening.
(Score: 1) by linuxrocks123 on Monday October 06 2014, @03:42AM
Slackware got rid of GNOME several releases ago; Slackware uses a very transparent BSD-style init system; Slackware's philosophy is that "it's your system" and you should be able to configure it however you want, and the distro should help facilitate your choices as much as is reasonable. Slackware is the oldest still-living Linux distro. Slackware's current users would probably immediately fork the distro if it adopted systemd as anything other than an optional add-on.
Don't want systemd? Slackware's waiting for you.
(Score: 2) by francois.barbier on Sunday September 28 2014, @07:05PM
I like your use of the word "infected". Because it is what it is.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 29 2014, @04:32AM
Bollocks, I've tested this on workstations, laptops and servers. You can even skip a step: apt-get install sysvinit-core will remove systemd for you.
Most packages only depend on an init system provider, they don't care which one it is. The only thing I lost was NetworkManager which is never installed on servers anyway and easily replaced with wicd or equivalent on laptops.
(Score: 1) by hendrikboom on Tuesday September 30 2014, @11:14PM
The only thing I lost was NetworkManager
So does NetworkManager now depend on systemd? When did this dependency appear in jessie/testing? About a month or so ago? That's when my wifi stopped working properly.
Also in the last month the file manager in xfce stopped having the permissinos it needs to mount USB sticks. Is there a similar problem there?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 28 2014, @01:27PM
I have two SoylentNews bugs to report:
1) The "coup" and "stick with Debian 7" hyperlinks in the summary are correct when viewing the summary from the index page, but they are currently http://soylentnews.org/__SLASHLINK__ [soylentnews.org] when viewing the comments page.
2) Bug reports are submitted through GitHub. I refuse to use GitHub because I do not want to be associated in any way with the Rubyers and JavaScripters who infest GitHub. But I do want to help make the SoylentNews software more robust. There should be some way of submitting a bug report anonymously from the SoylentNews website. Maybe it could then submit them as GitHub issues using a SoylentNewsAnonymousCoward GitHub account, or something along those lines.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 28 2014, @03:06PM
Unless github prevents you submitting an anonymous ticket, this appears to be a bug in your logic.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday September 28 2014, @06:21PM
It does allow anonymous coward type posting of issues and thanks to GP for the report regardless of where it went.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 28 2014, @06:35PM
When I click the "New issue" button on the GitHub site it shows me a "Sign in" form.
How do I submit an issue anonymously with GitHub?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 28 2014, @08:38PM
has been added to http://wiki.soylentnews.org/wiki/Suggestions [soylentnews.org]