SoylentNews

Debian General Resolution to Prevent Init System Coupling Fails to Pass

posted by janrinok on Wednesday November 19 2014, @11:25AM   
from the I-hope-we-don't-regret-this dept.

novak writes:

Ian Jackson's general resolution to prevent init system coupling has failed to pass, the majority vote deciding that the resolution is unnecessary. This means that not only will Debian's default init be systemd, but packages will not be required to support other init systems. Presumably, this means that using other init systems on Debian (without using systemd as a base) will not be possible without major workarounds, or possibly at all. It also leaves the future of Debian projects such as kFreeBSD unclear, as systemd is linux specific.

The vote results can be found here

The winners are:

Option 4 "General Resolution is not required"

• Re:Sh** Re:Sh** (Score: 2) by melikamp on Thursday November 20 2014, @03:30AM

  by melikamp (1886) on Thursday November 20 2014, @03:30AM (#117979) Journal

  You actually sound like a sane normal person caught amid a giant foodfight full of rotten tomatos. Looks like everyone decided to overreact at the same time. It's not like wheezy will ever switch, and wheezy is good to go for a couple of years at least, and more on servers, which is the use case everyone is crying about. Why all the panic and the message of doom? Anti-systemd crowd likes to point at the refuge of Slackware, but Slackware is the distro where the user is expected to pick up the slack. Don't like the systemd? Well roll your own distro, right? Fork something. While some posters whail and tear their clothes, others are forking udev. No serious userland application (and that includes all servers) will ever tie itself to init, because their respective developers are not insane. So SUPPOSE we loose Gnome, that's one environment among half a dozen by now, and not a very good one. The doom will simply fail to materialize. systemd will proceed to become more sane, reliable, and unixlike if that's what works. Alternative inits will continue to exist. I will continue to use (deblobbed) Slackware and chew gum, and at this point I really don't care which init I end up with, as long as it works. The more I read about the technical differences between systemd and more traditional shell-driven inits, the more I am convinced none of this is really a big deal. It only becomes that when people take their emotional response to the forums.

  Parent

  Starting Score:	1		point
  Karma-Bonus Modifier		+1
  Total Score:		2

• Re:Sh** (Score: 2) by Marand on Thursday November 20 2014, @06:09AM

  by Marand (1081) on Thursday November 20 2014, @06:09AM (#118011) Journal

  I might sound sane and normal about it right now, but if systemd-shim vanishes for some reason, I can guarantee that I'll be frothing at the mouth along with rest over it. Nearly all of my systemd complaints are about the init, logging, and the shitty, politically-charged adoption. Using the shim lets me avoid two of the three, and the third doesn't affect me in day-to-day use. I've already said a fair bit about Poettering, Sievers, and the pushy, rushed adoption of systemd already in other threads, so there isn't much point revisiting the complaints, but it's still a sore point with me. Still, that's not reason enough by itself to flee to BSD when Ubuntu and Debian have worked around some of the brain damage with the shim package.

  One potential fear with systemd, and one I do agree with, is that Poettering, Sievers, and co. are using their influence in so many pieces of Linux software to unfairly tie everything together in a way that will make systemd unavoidable. It's a sleazy tactic and it's pretty obvious it's really happening. Pulseaudio depends on systemd now. udev is folded into systemd. NetworkManager requires systemd now. udisks and upower (which I believe Poettering has been involved in) need systemd. Probably some more but I can't think of what else.

  Another is that distros will stop providing non-systemd start/stop scripts after systemd becomes the default, effectively making non-systemd impossible. I think this is a legitimate concern, but not necessarily a serious one, because someone that's serious about using an alternate init will be willing (and hardcore enough) to make their own init scripts or whatever. Someone might even rig up a systemd-to-sysv script generator of some kind to serve as a starting point.

  All said, I do think the systemd problem is a fairly big deal, but I don't think it's going to destroy Debian or Linux. Like you said, there are enough sane users and devs around that eventually, even if systemd ends up ubiquitous, it'll get tempered into something less insane. The real problem is the sleazy and suspicious way the whole thing has happened, and I have a feeling that's where a lot of the vitriol and emotion comes from. There's a huge backlash here because people feel cornered, forced into something abruptly. Hell, Debian's normal decision-making could reasonably be compared to an Entmoot, but not with systemd. Just for a comparison, I think systemd may have made its way from newcomer to default faster than Debian switched from KDE 3.5 to KDE 4.x

  Parent