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posted by n1 on Sunday September 28 2014, @06:27AM   Printer-friendly
from the yet-another-systemd-story dept.

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.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by Marand on Sunday September 28 2014, @12:39PM

    by Marand (1081) on Sunday September 28 2014, @12:39PM (#99187) Journal

    The fork could be as minimal as a repo that never stops shipping alternative inits.

    If that's the case, the fork would only need to exist if Debian stops packaging systemd-shim and alternative inits. That isn't the case currently. That, however, isn't a good solution for avoiding systemd, because all you're avoiding is the init portion. You still have systemd installed, with all its other parts that you may not want*.

    As it stands currently, a systemd-free desktop distro is going to have to fork all the projects that depend on systemd in some form, such as udisks, upower, libpam-systemd, etc. Udisks is used for friendly block device management (removable storage), Upower for power management, and libpam-systemd (which directly requires systemd) is used for things like packagekit (package management stuff).

    Somehow I think xmonad will be free of the taint so I think I'm OK there. For over a decade my "linux desktop requirements" are openssh and a web browser and a way to switch between them, so I don't really care if someone's mp3 player or sudoku clone "needs" some weird init system.

    It doesn't really matter how little you use, or how far removed you think you are from the use cases that will put you in systemd's path. For example, udev has been folded into systemd upstream. At one point, Debian testing wouldn't allow updating udev without installing systemd, though I'm not sure if that was a temporary fluke that's since been fixed. When that happens, you don't avoid systemd unless you only use the console.

    If you want to abandon udev, you have to give up xserver-xorg-core, which means goodbye to xmonad and your (graphical) browser. At some point in the past few months, during an update, I was given two choices: "remove udev, xorg and anything that needs either" or "use systemd". I found systemd-shim, so I got to keep my init, but I've still got the other parts, like it or not. Eventually you will, too. Like you've said about systemd before: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

    The ray of hope here is that Gentoo has forked udev (eudev [gentoo.org]), so there's a possibility of eventually having repositories for other distros, if everybody else goes completely insane.

    this "if you're not with us, you're against us" WRT init systems...

    I don't think it's even that simple socially. When they were making the decision of whether to use upstart, init, something else, or stick to sysv-init, there were a lot of dissenting voices against systemd among the Debian people. And that's not even getting into the way it was presented as a purely technical issue, which limited discussion and voting to a subset and affected the outcome. It's quite possible that, depending on how this is handled from here, enough people will get pissed off and make a Debian fork possible.

    Might be futile in the long-term, though, because of how systemd is tying itself to everything possible. Normally if you don't like the direction distros are taking, you can just roll your own and avoid what you don't like, but this is different. If something doesn't change, it's possible that it will be easier to replace the Linux kernel in a Linux system than it will be to replace systemd.

    ---

    * You can avoid systemd as init easily enough, but you're still saddled with logind, journald, etc. I'm still using sysv init, but I'm not enjoying seeing systemd's other parts shit up my system logs.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 28 2014, @07:49PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 28 2014, @07:49PM (#99320)

    My system doesn't use any of that except udev for one.

    • (Score: 2) by Marand on Monday September 29 2014, @02:15AM

      by Marand (1081) on Monday September 29 2014, @02:15AM (#99432) Journal

      My system doesn't use any of that except udev for one.

      Irrelevant unless you've somehow convinced the would-be forkers to support a distro for one user. Those things provide functionality that's considered standard now, and are needed for most of the desktop environments (not window managers) in some form. Leaving out all the pieces that depend on systemd without providing alternatives means problems providing MATE, Cinnamon, KDE, possibly even Xfce. Power and removable storage management are used a lot by DEs. Even WindowMaker depends on upower now by way of the wmbattery dock-app.

      Even without udev (which is part of systemd now), systemd has managed to get its hooks into some of the most important parts of making a system user-friendly. Systemd's already reached the point where completely avoiding it will require a lot of work, forking, and maintaining your own versions unless you can convince the various upstreams to use alternatives.

      Unless someone is going to make a distro that only provides console apps and a tiling window manager, they're going to have to face these problems. It's not pretty, it's getting worse by the day, and people predicted it early on so there was plenty of warning that went unheeded.