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Rumblings of a Debian Fork Amidst Anger Over systemd

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

An Anonymous Coward writes:

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: 4, Insightful) by tonyPick on Sunday September 28 2014, @04:37PM

    by tonyPick (1237) on Sunday September 28 2014, @04:37PM (#99240) Homepage Journal

    SystemD is *not* monolithic, at least not any more. It's actually quite modular, consisting of a large number of separate binaries that can be include or excluded at build time.

    Great. So you can take a machine that doesn't have systemd and is running a 2.6 series kernel, and just run the standalone journald binary on it? Or put it on a BSD box? (Answer: not really)

    The thing that makes it monolithic is the fact that all the pieces of it are interdependent. Putting it into separate binaries makes it Modular, but it can still be a Monolithic architecture. Monolithic and Modular are not antonyms.

    Or, to quote wikipedia, a monolithic architecture is one in which the functionally distinct aspects:

    are not architecturally separate components but are all interwoven

    And given the systemd authors stance that you can't take out some key pieces like logind and reimplement it separately (See http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/InterfacePortabilityAndStabilityChart/ [freedesktop.org]), that's a pretty good description of systemd to me.

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  • (Score: 2) by zocalo on Sunday September 28 2014, @05:13PM

    by zocalo (302) on Sunday September 28 2014, @05:13PM (#99247)
    That's a semantic difference that you didn't make in your original post, hence my response. It is, however, one that I agree with - that's what I was getting at with the bit about being able to break the SystemD bundle up into different packages, then more cleanly and completely swap the non-PID1 components of SystemD out for alternates. At the moment I would also argue that it is monolithic in that context, but there is no technical reason why it couldn't become a suite of standalone tools, albeit with a high level of integration. The biggest issue with that though is likely breakages of those projects that have drunk deep of the SystemD kool-aid and insist on it being present to run, but you reap what you sow...

    Ultimately, I think SystemD is here to stay, and will likely end up as much a part of Linux as the kernel and GLibC. Too many distros have too much invested in it now to change direction, and it would be a rare distro that will be prepared to completely drop all of the growing numbers of packages that only work if SystemD is present. We can either keep bitching about it (which appears to be futile), produce a workable alternative that is appealing enough to encourage distros to switch (which will probably take too long given the growing list of dependencies upon SystemD that will break), or try and convince the SystemD team and distro packagers to address the concerns being raised by the community (which currently appears to be falling on deaf ears). It's a Hobson's Choice, but I think the last one is probably the best option - other than switching to BSD, anyway.
    --
    UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!