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Noted Linux expert Chris Siebenmann has described two catastrophic failures involving systemd.
One of the problems he encountered with systemd became apparent during a disastrous upgrade of a system from Fedora 20 to Fedora 21. It involved PID 1 segfaulting during the upgrade process. He isn't the only victim to suffer from this type of bad experience, either. The bug report for this problem is still showing a status of NEW, nearly a month after it was opened.
The second problem with systemd that he describes involves the journalctl utility. It displays log messages with long lines in a way that requires sideways scrolling, as well as displaying all messages since the beginning of time, in forward chronological order. Both of these behaviors contribute to making the tool much less usable, especially in critical situations where time and efficiency are of the essence.
Problems like these raise some serious questions about systemd, and its suitability for use by major Linux distros like Fedora and Debian. How can systemd be used if it can segfault in such a way, or if the tools that are provided to assist with the recovery exhibit such counter-intuitive, if not outright useless, behavior?
Editor's Comment: I am not a supporter of systemd, but if there are only 2 such reported occurrences of this fault, as noted in one of the links, then perhaps it is not a widespread fault but actually a very rare one. This would certainly explain - although not justify - why there has been so little apparent interest being shown by the maintainers. Nevertheless, the fault should still be fixed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @05:07PM
I just can't understand why Debian is still going forward with systemd. How many more of these idiotic, unacceptable problems will there need to be before it's removed?
At this point, I think it'd be perfectly appropriate to postpone Jessie until systemd can be removed. Get rid of it, and start the Jessie stabilization process from scratch. If that means the release is delayed for months or years, so be it. It's just the right thing to do.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Justin Case on Sunday December 21 2014, @05:58PM
> I just can't understand why Debian is still going forward with systemd. How many more of these idiotic, unacceptable problems will there need to be before it's removed?
Perhaps you are misunderstanding their motives. You think "If I were doing this, I would want to produce a quality product." and so you assume they think the same. In your world, once they finally understand the error of their ways, they would repent and sin no more, even if it meant throwing out years of wasted (if shoddy) work.
Imagine someone whose internal thoughts instead go like this: "Sure there are problems here and there, but I'm going to plow ahead anyway." What is that person's motivation?
Now you start to understand what we're up against.
(Score: 2) by jimshatt on Monday December 22 2014, @12:22AM
(Score: 3, Interesting) by novak on Sunday December 21 2014, @07:16PM
While you're correct and they do need to put the brakes on hard, and release "when it is ready," I think it's pretty obvious that's not going to happen. Gnome3 and Pulseaudio both skated happily into the last release as defaults, and those are pretty broken, hated pieces of software. Systemd is just the formalization of their commitment to mainstream over quality.
novak
(Score: 3, Funny) by digitalaudiorock on Sunday December 21 2014, @07:55PM
...not more than releasing "when it is needed" which would be "never"...
(Score: 2) by novak on Sunday December 21 2014, @08:11PM
Yeah, by "when it is ready" I meant Debian 8, not systemd. I can agree that systemd will never be needed and probably never high quality enough to deserve to be in a real linux distro.
My point is that Debian has acting questionably for years, and now they are clarifying that they do indeed intend to adopt whatever comes down the pike instead of slashing anything that fails to meet their standards.
Hopefully enough people who remember the old debian will support devuan and they'll get some traction.
novak
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22 2014, @11:15AM
The debian faggots should be beaten. They are SJW fucks who ruined something good. They infiltrated and took over.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday December 22 2014, @04:16AM
I would at least like to see them add an option to the installer to choose init systems. Currently, I can install Jessie with sysV but only by using expert mode and opening a shell to switch init packages in the target.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @07:43PM
I've been recommending Debian to people for years, for many reasons.
I've gone into shops and replaced dozens of RH/Cent boxes with Debian machines, which work so much better.
I've spent a career making fun of the *BSD people.
Now that Debian has turned into Windows+, I'm forced to go back to these *BSD people and admit they were right.
Thanks a lot, Debian.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22 2014, @12:02AM
You're not wrong. Debian is still the best there is. By Debian, though, I don't mean Jessie. Jessie isn't Debian in any sense. It's just not true Debian, because it doesn't follow the philosophy of Debian. So I consider it to be a fork of Debian.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22 2014, @12:54AM
I bet Jessie ain't Scottish either!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22 2014, @11:07AM
Debian has been taken over by SJWs.
All conservatives have been kicked out.
SJWs like change.