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Earlier this week, KDE developer David Edmundson described in his blog how KDE would be tied to logind and timedated but not systemd itself, at least according to his claim that "The init system is one part of systemd that doesn't affect us at all, and any other could be used.".
Later, in the blog comments, he clarifies that starting with plasma 5.5, in 6 months, they'll drop "legacy" support, according to a decision taken in the plasma sprint.
Even if one can only guess why there is no formal announcement, it seems clear - unless somehow there is a shim or emulator, not only for logind but also for timedated, in 6 months KDE will be unusable unless you are running systemd. And the blog entry makes it clear that the plan is to remove more and more functionality from KDE and use systemd instead.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Gaaark on Friday February 20 2015, @01:24PM
Since when did a desktop environment start depending on 'boot' systems?
this is an actual question: not a troll, but a curious person.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Friday February 20 2015, @01:27PM
Sorry... just rtfa....
[gives head a shake]
Still seems odd...
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Nerdfest on Friday February 20 2015, @02:31PM
It's really too bad., I tried out the alpha of the upcoming Xubuntu release and I think it's hands-down the prettiest desktop environment I've ever seen. I'll probably stick with it, but I know others won't because of systemd. People really don't seem to understand about proper component decoupling (again, assuming a shim layer is not being implemented that will convert time and date API calls to the underlying implementations). What the hell is going on these days? Like open protocols, loosely coupled designs are one of the big reasons things can move forward so fast when improving things.
(Score: 3, Funny) by GeminiDomino on Friday February 20 2015, @03:30PM
Has XFCE moved to require the systemd suite too, or is it just the underlying Ubuntu system?
"We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of our culture"
(Score: 5, Informative) by arashi no garou on Friday February 20 2015, @03:49PM
Just Ubuntu; Xfce hasn't had a major release in three years so I doubt it will be adopting anything systemd related any time soon. And the subject of the article and summary suggests that either Slackware will be forced to adopt systemd to keep KDE, or else Pat will be forced to abandon KDE (I believe he still uses it daily). A lot of Slackware users use KDE, so this stands to affect the entire distro, its maintainers, and its users.
This fucking sucks, and I don't even use KDE myself.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by melikamp on Friday February 20 2015, @04:47PM
Slackware does not use the bleeding edge KDE, so it will be years before PV's hand is forced. During these years the cool heads may well prevail and hack KDE back into interoperability. Do not panic, keep calm and carry on, etc. etc. etc.
(Score: 2) by nightsky30 on Friday February 20 2015, @05:36PM
Can we fork KDE and call it FKDE? The "F" can stand for Fork whatever you think is appropriate.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 20 2015, @06:52PM
Call it "F**k you". Where the two stars stand for "or", of course. ;-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 20 2015, @11:35PM
Maybe just rename KDE, SDDE (Systemd Desktop Environment) since they decided to allow him to do the forking.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by arashi no garou on Friday February 20 2015, @05:41PM
During these years the cool heads may well prevail and hack KDE back into interoperability.
The same thing was said about systemd not long before it was forced on the vast majority of GNU/Linux users. I'm not giving up on Slackware, I'm just acknowledging that Pat and the team will likely have a huge burden on their hands soon enough, no matter which way it goes (dumping KDE altogether, heavily patching it to work around systemd, or caving and accepting systemd and all that that entails).
And while Slackware releases don't track the bleeding edge, often -current does. I just don't want to see Pat suddenly stop development on the OS as a whole because a hugely important project gets infected with a malaise he's otherwise been able to avoid. He shouldn't have to commit already limited resources to fixing a problem that wasn't broken to start with. Why a DE of all things needs systemd hooks boggles the mind. It makes me glad I use a pretty bare WM in Slackware.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by melikamp on Friday February 20 2015, @07:27PM
Forced by whom? I am neither a systemd supporter nor an LP or KS sympathizer, but the nature of the debate forces me to take their side on some occasions. For what you are saying, the distributions are at fault. The "cabal" cannot twist anyone's hand outside of the Red Hat universe. Debian users in particular are stuck with systemd because of decisions made by their own committee. No one was forcing anyone to adapt systemd, let alone adapt it so soon. As Slackware users, me and you know full well that nothing of practical significance depends on it as of yet.
I agree with some of this, but not all. I agree there is a risk that Slackware will suffer as a result of this shuffle. While I don't use KWin, I understand that losing it is unacceptable for great many users. I also agree that replacing the current init by systemd may be too taxing for the Slackware development team.
But I strongly disagree with "infected" and the rest of the value-laden BS that flies thick in all of these discussions. From the technical standpoint, there is nothing seriously wrong with systemd, meaning that whatever faults it has today can be fixed tomorrow. (For example, binary logs are stupid, but there is nothing preventing admins from keeping text logs as well.) In fact, I see nothing of value in the boilerplate bash code used in Slackware init, so IMHO here's something systemd got right. The "cabal"'s attitude may be rotten at times, which makes fixing bugs harder than it needs to be, but again, this is not a show-stopper as long as the software is free. At the end of the day, users do not care how their machine boots, as long as it does.
So once again I'd like to point the finger at the real offenders: KDE team in this case. They are free to decide whether they want to be portable, and to what extent, and if they limit themselves to Linux+systemd, well, whose fault is that? It's not an "infection", it's just one of the half-a-dozen DEs going non-portable. Sad, but you know what? Fuck it. We'll just keep using our openboxes and what not, while some of us will design and build yet more portable DEs.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by arashi no garou on Friday February 20 2015, @07:51PM
From the technical standpoint, there is nothing seriously wrong with systemd
I said as much in another comment; the biggest problem in my mind with systemd is a philosophical one, not a technical one. It's about power and control, more specifically about a few people taking the Linux community in a direction the community doesn't necessarily want to go. I say it was forced on us because quite simply, it was; when Debian adopted systemd against the will of many of its users and members (several Debian committee members asked for more time to debate the switch and were ignored), much of the GNU/Linux community had no choice but to follow, as Ubuntu and Mint, the two distros with the largest userbase, are Debian based. The whole Debian debacle was when I started really paying attention to systemd and Poettering's motives, and I saw the same tactics used in corporate takeovers (lies, backroom deals, bullying) being used in what is supposed to be the opposite of the corporate world.
Maybe, in the end, systemd will be the technically superior way to do desktop Linux. If so, I'm fine with that. What disgusts me and makes me want to avoid it is all the political bullshit and power plays behind it. That kind of thing doesn't belong in the Free software world, and it most certainly doesn't belong on my systems.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anti-NAT on Saturday February 21 2015, @05:15AM
The joke of the outrage is that SystemD has been in Fedora since version 15, released in May 2011. As there have been 6 releases since, all including SystemD, clearly the problems the ragers think is going to happen won't. It would have been abandoned by Fedora, or Fedora's users would have abandoned Fedora, if SystemD is as bad as people are making it out to be.
As most people who criticise SystemD repeatedly state falsehoods about it, because they don't actually know what they're talking about (and have no interest in finding out about it), it really says that they're not complaining about SystemD, they're really complaining about change. Technology is always changing, if you can't handle change, go back to pens and pencils.
If the supposed worst happens with SystemD, (a) it can be forked and (b) its API calls are clearly available to be reimplemented.
Nobody is forcing other distributions or software to adopt SystemD or its components - they're doing it because they can see benefits in comparison to their existing methods.
Nobody is forcing you to stay using those distributions if you don't like the direction they're heading either. I've changed distributions plenty of times since 1993 - I've used Slackware, Redhat, Debian, Ubunto, ArchLinux and now use Fedora. It's not hard, and interesting to find out the different ways the same problems are solved.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 22 2015, @08:40AM
Fedora won't abandon it, because RH needs it for its security wankery sales pits to the MIC.
Fedora seems to always be on the forefront of adopting something "security" related, and/or pushing stuff that is related to same.
Lately there have been a whole lot of RH people screaming, under the guise of Gnome or Wayland devs, "X11 IS NOT SECURE!!!".
Fedora was also on the forefront of adopting SELinux, and it was a massive pain...
And one would suspect that if one traced the lineage of Polkit etc it would lead back to someone on the RH payroll.
But at the same time the Systemd guys manage to add a DNS "client" that is susceptible to cache poisoning. A issue as old as DNS caching, and has known techniques for avoiding...
In essence Fedora is sticking with it because it is "their" project.
Others on the other hand is likely adopting it, or adopted it, back when it was simply a init replacement. These days however it is so much "more". And has a stated goal of reworking the Linux "distro" (more like making them all march in lock step) from the ground up (cramming everything into /usr etc).
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday February 23 2015, @07:31PM
I've had to add a bunch of systemctl commands to my .xinitrc because I couldn't figure out how the hell to get them to start in a predictable order. Network works fine one day, then I upgrade my system and suddenly the services start up in a different order and the network fails on boot...then I update again and it goes back the way it used to be...so now as soon as the system is up I just immediately reboot all the related services in the correct order since SystemD apparently can't figure that out...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 20 2015, @09:28PM
No one was forcing anyone to adapt systemd, let alone adapt it so soon.
That's like saying "I'm not forcing you to stop driving a car, I'm just removing all gas stations in a 100 km radius around where you live. You can still drive if you want to. You can even get gas and refill your car to keep driving. It's your choice." True each application can choose to adopt or not adopt to it, but given how tightly integrated it is with certain applications if you have any dependency on one of those applications you are stuck with the "choice" of either not adopting it and manually working around it (driving 100km each time you want to get a patch), or adopting it (stop driving your car). Nominally you have a choice, but only in a superficial sense.
From the technical standpoint, there is nothing seriously wrong with systemd, meaning that whatever faults it has today can be fixed tomorrow. (For example, binary logs are stupid, but there is nothing preventing admins from keeping text logs as well.)
Unless you happen to disagree with the design philosophy of system (i.e. "having it do everything" with the commensurate loss of control and increased system fragility). That can't be "fixed" as such. And in the meantime, you are still using unproven software which may have security holes, stability issues, maintenance issues, or whatever else.
It's not an "infection", it's just one of the half-a-dozen DEs going non-portable.
Calling KDE "just one of the half-a-dozen DEs" grossly under-represents how big and important it is. And the word "infection" is a perfect term given the network effects of dependencies across software packages.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by melikamp on Friday February 20 2015, @09:43PM
The parent post is a perfect example of the unadulterated value-laden cow dung I was talking about, complete with "design philosophy" nonsense. It fails to address the single point I was stressing: distributions independent of Red Hat are adopting systemd by choice, and userland applications create hard dependencies on systemd not only by choice, but also because they, apparently, intend to be unportable just for lulz. Good riddance. There is no doom coming, systemd is just another init, and not the worst one, and while some upheaval will force some users to seek new pastures, what we observe is business as usual.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Hairyfeet on Friday February 20 2015, @10:24PM
And I think YOU sir have missed the point of many here, which is that the users have said by a pretty damned large margin "We do NOT want this" and the devs have turned top their own users and said "Fuck you, we do not care what you want"...yes this attitude is very disturbing, and when you see distros that are supposedly "stability over all" like Debian jump on the bandwagon and start throwing up appeals to emotion instead of technical arguments?
Well as I have said in other posts everybody can call me a tinfoil hatter (just as they did everybody who said our calls were monitored before Manning) but the combination of timing, coming so soon after Snowden let loose the TLAs best tricks and many are pushing Linux as a platform for secure communication, mixed with the frankly bizarre posting made by devs defending Poettering....I mean for fucks sake LP in one of his own posts said along the lines of "Can't get systemd working on ARM, fuck it shipping anyway" and devs not only didn't condemn him for treating a critical subsystem like systemd like its a fricking videogame patch and busted his ass for sending it out broken but they rushed to DEFEND such Mickey Mouse behavior? I'm sorry but the top tier Linux guys have NEVER been tolerant of the "fuck it, ship it and we'll patych later" kind of cowboy bullshit, they condemn that kind of shit on the Windows side all the time!
I'm sorry but something is rotten in Denmark, the entire dev community is just too quick and too easy and too busy acting like every day is opposite day for me to believe this is a natural or organic change in the landscape. Whether this is the TLAs that pretty much own Red Hat making sure there is a nice easily exploitable back door so that all these "secure communication distros" are just so much warm fuzzy BS, or Red Hat trying to become the big boss? I have no idea. All I do know is I have been keeping an eye on Linux since around 2003 and I can honestly say I have NEVER seen Linux distro devs behave in such a strange and anti-user fashion before, never.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 1, Troll) by melikamp on Friday February 20 2015, @10:41PM
This has absolutely nothing to do with either systemd or the "cabal" or anything at all in the sense that it's a completely generic problem, and can only be described as "business as usual". This is exactly how developers relate to users during a software development cycle; this is true for the free software, and 3 times as true for the proprietary spyware. Exceptions are rare and precious. And if you or any of the systemd doomsayers were actually interested in solving THIS problem, you wouldn't make it about your personal hatred of the "cabal" and everything they stand for, would you? You would talk about the community culture at large, problems in communication, structural inefficiencies, etc.
Both GNU and Linux are maturing and growing, and it makes sense that each new change in the ecosystem brings a bigger upheaval, that's all. We transitioned from an ecosystem where many users were also contributors to the one where almost all users are pure users. And pure users are NEVER happy with change, and when there are 100 times more of them, they are 100 times more vocal about it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 22 2015, @08:48AM
Not sure how many are adopting them by choice, or by seeing the 800 pound gorilla throwing its weight around and not wanting to be in the way. Systemd is adopting more and more "container" functionality. CoreOS recently used this to launch a rival to Docker, and recent Systemd releases has gained the ability to import Docker containers. RH event stated that the cloud would be a big focus of theirs moving forward. In essence, if you want to be in the server game going forward you better follow RH's lead.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Arik on Friday February 20 2015, @09:49PM
You're wrong. The design aim of 'throw everything in PID1' is wrong, wrong, wrong. The problems with systemd are inherent in the design philosophy and cannot be fixed without fundamentally altering the nature of the project.
Your binary logs example is actually a good example - against your thesis. In fact, although you can relatively easily get systemd to produce a second set of logs, in text, and this *appears* at first glance to moot the objection, in fact it is completely unsatisfactory. In case of system crash or failure to boot - the very cases where the logs are most needed and it's most important that they be in text - this setting fails as well.
The distinction you make between 'technical' and 'philosophical' objections is also a mirage. In fact, the 'philosophical' objections are actually technical. We do not oppose overloading the init system with all sorts of other functions because it offends our esthetic sensibilities - we oppose that because we know it is the opposite of good engineering and will inevitably result in bugs and bad behavior.
After you stomp bugs for a decade or two maybe you think to quit leaving out so much food for them.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by melikamp on Friday February 20 2015, @10:11PM
I am not an OS designer and my personal opinion about the technical merits of systemd is pretty worthless. I can see, however, that major distributions are adopting systemd one after another, motivated in large part by what THEY perceive as technical advantages, and the doom is failing to materialize. I also read the criticism of systemd by people who are qualified to judge it on technical issues, and they seem to agree on the fact that it's not perfect, but basically works. I also knew you have no idea what you are talking about when you mentioned the "design philosophy". Would that be the "UNIX design philosophy", by any chance? "Do one thing" and blah blah blah? Because Linux (just 1 example!) spat all over that, but I don't hear you complaining.
If what you are saying is true, then the bug can be summarized as follows: when boot fails, logs are unavailable, period. What does it have to do with logs being binary or text? I am not saying systemd is bug-free, I am just saying YOUR objections to it make no fucking sense to me.
Even I can tell you don't seem to understand (or may be don't even care to try to understand) how systemd is designed. No, you don't have any technical objections, because if you had one, you'd let us know what it is, and then we would see that like all the other inits, systemd has its pros and cons.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by hash14 on Saturday February 21 2015, @04:36AM
I can see, however, that major distributions are adopting systemd one after another, motivated in large part by what THEY perceive as technical advantages, and the doom is failing to materialize.
The doom will most likely materialize in the same form as Shellshock or Heartbleed or any other of the many other high profile vulnerabilities we just saw last year. But LP would eat his shoe before admitting he's wrong so nothing will get done about it, plus the way they see any attempt to fix their disaster as WONTFIX NOTABUG just shows how adamant they are about taking over the whole Linux ecosystem and tanking it.
But I will be far far away on either Gentoo, BSD, or some other alternative when this disaster strikes, so I can't wait to see the shit hit the fan.
I also read the criticism of systemd by people who are qualified to judge it on technical issues, and they seem to agree on the fact that it's not perfect, but basically works.
Sounds a lot like Windows, which seems to have yet another critical vulnerability every other patch cycle. Why was Debian the most successful project because it was taken over by Red Hat? Because they strove to make it perfect. There is a point to the pain in the labour - because otherwise, you just have a crappy platform that's full of holes, and which nobody understands which is a hacker's dream. Just wait and see - eventually, Red Hat will be reduced to an open source clone of Windows. That's great if all you care about is money and market share, but when it comes to getting shit done, those who want real assurance of stability, security and productivity will be doing something completely different.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 21 2015, @06:36PM
THIS.
It is the new blossoming openSSL project catastrophe ripe for the inevitable DOSing of the entirety of Linux at some point in the future.
Speaking of openSSL, SystemD might want to add that to the load of crap it handles, or at least contact the openSSL team and let them know SystemD needs to be one of their dependencies, because FUCK KNOWS WHY.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Arik on Saturday February 21 2015, @05:14AM
There are no technical advantages of any consequence, and if you think technical advantages are driving adoption you have not been paying attention. Politics is driving adoption and that is plain as day.
Disagree? Name one.
"If what you are saying is true, then the bug can be summarized as follows: when boot fails, logs are unavailable, period. What does it have to do with logs being binary or text?"
It has everything to do with binary logs vs text logs. When a system crashes with a text file open, the result is human recoverable and readable. When a system crashes with a binary file open, the same is not true.
The right way to do this, assuming there was someone with a compelling need for the binary logs in the first place (which may or may not be true,) would be to do the text log as primary, then mirror it to a binary log.
"I am not saying systemd is bug-free, I am just saying YOUR objections to it make no fucking sense to me."
You may need more experience before you will understand them. The design guarantees bugs, I dont need to wait around for 10 years for the bulk of them to be found to know that they are inevitable (or to anticipate that the cabal will WONTFIX the bulk of them.)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 22 2015, @08:42AM
Could it be that Slack ends up adopting Trinity rather than follow KDE forward?
http://trinitydesktop.org/index.php [trinitydesktop.org]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 20 2015, @04:59PM
>suggests that either Slackware will be forced to adopt systemd to keep KDE, or else Pat will be forced to abandon KDE
No need of either; there are enough skilled people in Slackware community to work around any such contrived dependencies.
Just the same as Skype's requiring PulseAudio absolutely had not resulted in us "adopting" the beastly thing. Instead, in mere days, we have developed workarounds, and have no problem since.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Friday February 20 2015, @07:39PM
Sorry, I meant Kubuntu. All use both KDE and Xfce and am too used to typing both.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 22 2015, @12:57PM
One XFCE dev actually forked the consolekit code, and has done some effort towards putting in support for logind dbus calls etc.
https://erickoegel.wordpress.com/2014/10/20/consolekit2/ [wordpress.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Friday February 20 2015, @09:46PM
assuming a shim layer is not being implemented that will convert time and date API calls
I really can't understand why that approach isn't being taken.
Write it once, and done, no combing through your code to change every instance of an ever increasing number of functions that are handled by multiple different init systems.
This has been the prevailing method of dealing with changes in underlying structures, libraries, compilers, etc since before the systemd tyrants were born, since before linux was born. These shims are tiny, usually argument re-arranging, a jmp and a ret, and very little else. Only occasionally is any significant code or data structures needed.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 22 2015, @08:53AM
How deep does the rabbit hole go? Will we end up implementing systemd to avoid using systemd?
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 20 2015, @07:22PM
Did you learn from your experience and turn down your anti-systemd hyperbole level, or are you just going to keep blundering ahead with lies, even after falling on your face?
One thing becomes more and more clear as more software takes these decisions: The people in the "loud pundit" class have different views of systemd than the people actually in the positions to make technical decisions. And members of the "loud pundit" social category value each others pejoratives more highly than the technical points of the people actually in possession of knowledge of the details. What really blows the doors off is that they defend SysV init as some sort of holy cow. Uhm, yeah. If they're not embarrassed the first time they say it, they're probably never going to go into the technical details far enough to even understand the decisions.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday February 20 2015, @01:30PM
When the boot system demanded that the authentication system relied on it. The desktop has to rely on the authentication system to start sessions.
This is my biggest concern with systemd - the clear goal is to make it a dependency of everything other than the kernel. Absolutely nothing in the open source world has been in that position before (not even the Linux kernel, since userspace applications were typically built to work on BSDs and commercial Unixes and Cygwin too).
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by digitalaudiorock on Friday February 20 2015, @02:53PM
Exactly...like trying to run Windows without svchost.exe...which is actually a good analogy, because frankly using systemd is very much like running Windows and it's bloated svchost crap...binary Windows-fucking-event-log etc etc etc. I can't believe the open source community hasn't just flat out rejected it because of those phony dependencies alone. They're all clearly malicious...our way or the highway.
BTW...why does everyone suddenly start posting anonymously whenever systemd comes up? Does LP have like mob ties I don't know about? I'm not afraid to say how much I think it sucks...that's for sure.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 20 2015, @10:42PM
Choosing to not have an account when it is not necessary correlates highly with GNU philosophy. Likewise, sockpuppets and friends always post with accounts to appear credible.
(Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Saturday February 21 2015, @01:32AM
Wow...way to contribute to the discussion. I'll let other "sock puppets" weigh in on your bit of wisdom there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 22 2015, @08:56AM
Given the kdbus project, it may well be that the kernel comes to depend on systemd to do the talking to the userland...
(Score: 1) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 20 2015, @01:34PM
According to the blog, it doesn't. It just depends on something that happens to depend on the init system. You could always develop an alternative with the same badly defined and frequently changing interface, right? Something like wine trying to translate calls to Windows internals...
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Friday February 20 2015, @03:55PM
(Score: 4, Informative) by Gravis on Friday February 20 2015, @02:40PM
Since when did a desktop environment start depending on 'boot' systems?
actually, it doesn't.
The init system is one part of systemd that doesn't affect us at all, and any other could be used.
the problem we have here is that logind has been integrated into systemd.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 20 2015, @04:36PM
It's a good thing. The polarization of the 'community' on the issue has resulted in a need for users of the free/Free ecosystem to wakeup and take responsibility for the tools they need. Generally the slow moves toward the current situation had been ignored because if you didn't need it, you didn't use it. Now the coup has be sprung people have shown who they are and what colours they fly in such a way as they can be clearly identified.
As a generally if enough people view something as damage to the network, it will be worked around. It turns out that the people working around this current damage are the same people who worked around proprietary software restrictions the first time. Compared to that this is are walk in the park.
No doubt, as the proposed target audience turns out not to exist, and the people who are able move somewhere else/create something new, the carpetbaggers with come running to try and takeover the new commons as theirs crumbles.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Marand on Friday February 20 2015, @02:55PM
The gist of it is this:
"systemd" is a bunch of different things, ranging from an init system and binary (ick) logger to programs that manage login sessions, date and time, etc. It's a blanket moniker for a group of programs that Poettering and co. have decided will be the standard components for Linux systems. With that mindset, they're not worrying about those parts depending on each other, because it's supposed to be a standard kit that you use all together.
(brief tangent follows)
It's sort of like how FreeBSD separates the base system, which updates all together at once, and is separate from the other packages. Except that where people approve of FreeBSD's doing the same thing, it's not being received well among Linux users for various reasons, ranging from the absurd (conspiracy theories, misinformed beliefs, "it's different so it sucks") to the reasonable.
Part of that is because of the personalities leading the project, because of a reputation for bad designs and even worse implementations that then take others years to fix into something usable. It also doesn't help that Poettering and Sievers act like arrogant, know-it-all shits, actively interfering with improvement of their software. It's not a design flaw, it's a feature. We don't care if it corrupts logs, breaks randomly, or prevents booting. You just hate handicapped people or you'd be agreeing with me. NOTABUG WONTFIX GTFO. If someone else, more receptive to changing the design of the components, and not responsible for abominations like pulseaudio, were spearheading the whole thing a lot of the contention probably wouldn't exist.
Another problem is that it's not the way Linux has traditionally worked, so you have a group of people basically pushing for high levels of interdependency at a low level, where it's always been a very mix-and-match affair. In a relatively short period of time, this small group has basically declared itself the final authority on the Linux userland and started ripping up all the fixtures to put in its own, without any consideration of the others that happen to live there.
Anyway, back to KDE. The parts of it that KDE is apparently going to require are just another bullshit dbus, hal, etc. type of thing. No init system requirement. Those parts are created with an expectation of certain things, which creates a dependency on the systemd init, but it can be circumvented, at least for now. Debian has a small package called "systemd-shim" that gives the other systemd pieces (logind, etc.) what they need to operate (just cgroups support I think?) while allowing you to install any init system (and thus logger) you want.
As long as the shim's being maintained, Linux users can still avoid those parts of systemd, which is important IMO because a lot of the systemd complaints are about the init and logging system, specifically. (That's where most of my gripes are)
(Score: 2) by arashi no garou on Friday February 20 2015, @06:21PM
I agree with pretty much everything you said. I feel the problems with systemd are more philosophical than technical (though there are definitely technical issues too), and while I'm no conspiracy theorist, anyone can recognize that it's a power play by Poettering and Sievers driving the rapid growth of the project. I'm sure they honestly want "a better Linux OS", but they are going about it in a dishonorable way.
But all that aside, what happens when the shim no longer exists? A shim is meant as a temporary fix, not a permanent solution. There are ultimately two paths for any GNU/Linux ecosystem project: Accept systemd or reject it. A shim is just there to allow one to take longer to decide.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 20 2015, @07:53PM
And by "dishonorable," we mean, "they were hired to make the technical decisions, and they made decisions I wouldn't have made. And since I don't have their resume, and can't compete for the decision-making job, waaaaaaaaaa. waaaaaaaa. waaaaaaa."
Your neckbeard is crying all over the floor, jeeze.
(Score: 2) by arashi no garou on Friday February 20 2015, @08:47PM
Wait, you're saying that Poettering and Sievers are employees of Debian? What crack are you smoking?
And nice try with the "neckbeard" comment; your ad hominem is crying all over the floor.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday February 20 2015, @08:14PM
How are they being "dishonorable"? Their job is to create this system (they work for Red Hat, remember, who obviously wants this system). Other distros are adopting it, rightly or wrongly. Red Hat does not have the power to force other distros to adopt anything (or else we'd all be using RPMs right now), so obviously these distros are doing it willingly. How is that dishonorable?
I get the complaints about PulseAudio etc. However, the distros all adopted that willingly too. And for good reason: despite its many problems, it was better than the alternatives.
Basically what this all seems to me is: Lennart and company see a big problem with Linux, they cobble together a solution to attempt to fix it, and everyone else in their armchair bitches and complains that this solution isn't good enough. However, no one actually bothers to make their own solution; instead they seem to want to just keep using the broken stuff they've been using for 15 years and never change it. Ok, I get there's complaints about the technical quality (bugginess) of Lennart's stuff, about the way his cabal treats people, etc., but again, what alternative do we have? No one else wants to step and and do something similar. At best, we get other solutions which have far worse technical problems, like upstart, or we get solutions which simply don't go nearly far enough (OpenRC) to address the problems. I think we saw this with PulseAudio too, with competitors like ARtS.
As for shims, that's totally not true about them being temporary. I don't know where you got that crazy idea. Look at Nvidia's proprietary drivers for instance: they use an open-source shim to interface with the kernel. That's not a temporary solution; it's been that way almost forever, and isn't going to change unless the kernel devs suddenly decide to have a stable ABI for proprietary drivers (not going to happen). Or, if you forget about software, look at window shims: you use these to make your window square and level when you're installing it into your wall. Those shims are never removed; they always stay in between the window and the framing.
(Score: 3) by arashi no garou on Friday February 20 2015, @08:44PM
By "dishonorable" I mean the backroom tactics I've read about that led to the Debian decision. systemd may be a great piece of software, but if so it should compete on its merits, not on the whims of someone not even a part of the Debian group.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Friday February 20 2015, @09:26PM
What "backroom tactics"? I must have missed this. I thought the Debian decision was made by a vote between the people in charge of the project, not some outsiders. From what I remember, there was a lot of complaining by an Ian Jackson who seemed to be holding everything up because he didn't like it, but that's just one guy, and then when everyone else voted against him he got mad and quit the group.
(Score: 3, Informative) by tangomargarine on Friday February 20 2015, @11:03PM
"Everyone else voted against him" is a lie. The 8-person vote was 4 in favor of systemd as their first choice and 4 in favor of the other alternatives. And IIRC the only reason systemd won that vote was because the guy who "broke ties" (whatever you call it when you have a plurality but a majority is required) was in the systemd voting block.
Go look up the original Slashdot/Soylent articles on the vote. I swear Debian made their voting system as hard to understand as possible.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1, Troll) by Grishnakh on Friday February 27 2015, @08:25PM
It's not their fault you're too dumb to understand Condorcet voting, or any kind of voting system where you're allowed to vote for your preference for candidates.
(Score: 3, Informative) by arashi no garou on Saturday February 21 2015, @01:52AM
It's my understanding that there was a split vote, some of the voters wanted more time to think about it, but some heavy pushing by LP and KS privately caused those requests to be ignored. The vote was rushed and the swing voter said what amounted to "fuck it, roll with it" and it was done.
That's what I read back when it was going on, though I've heard from some (admittedly heavy systemd supporting) sources that it didn't go down like that, that it was a simple majority vote without drama and the perceived drama was manufactured by the anti-systemd camp. I find that hard to believe though, given the amount of controversy on both sides.
Either way, I choose not to run systemd because of that very controversy; I don't need drama with my OS. Hell, my Raspberry Pi's OS has some systemd parts in it, it hasn't crashed and burned and sacrificed goats like some anti-systemd folks swear it will. But I'm looking forward to getting my new RasPi 2 next week that should be able to run Slackware without issues.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 22 2015, @09:14AM
Poettering puts code for Logind into Gnome, while also declaring (he had gotten maintainer status) consolekit as dead to the point of shutting down the relevant mailing list.
Then he turns around and claim that nobody wanted consolekit since nobody was maintaining the supporting bits in Gnome.
Err dude you already declared consolekit dead and logind as the path forward...
The guy twists words like a snake coils, and then turns around and yells at Torvalds for making the Linux community a toxic work environment.
There is a video out there of one guy doing a presentation about what he sees as absurd layers of complexity in present day Linux. One of the projects called out happens to be one of Poettering's, and he is in the audience. Poettering starts heckling the presenter, to the point of asking of the presenter has something against disabled people (because some of the complexity could be used to help them in some way). In the end the presenter calls it quits, and Poettering jumps on stage and grabs the mic (beer bottle in hand no less)...
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Friday February 20 2015, @08:38PM
Shim is a misnomer. One of the aims of modular development (aka the Unix way) is to enable the use of alternative implementations of some components - and that is exactly what these "shims" are, alternative implementations of systemd components without the coupling to the rest of systemd.
Key thing of course is that someone has to maintain the shims, but only a small fraction of the effort that goes into complaining about systemd would be required for that...
(Score: 2) by arashi no garou on Friday February 20 2015, @08:52PM
Key thing of course is that someone has to maintain the shims
That is exactly my point. What happens when the shim maintainer walks away because either she accepts systemd or moves on to, say, BSD? A shim is a band-aid on a bleeding gash.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 22 2015, @06:53PM
I saw that video and felt the presenter was making some excellent points. Poetterng's behavior was surprising, childish and inexcusable. Systemd is being developed by a spoiled brat and while there are many other good reasons to avoid it, that fact alone is enough to turn many away.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 22 2015, @09:01AM
Well the BSDs are monolithic projects from the outset.
Linux on the other hand has been more like a bag of Lego bricks, each independent but interlocking via defined interfaces.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by moondrake on Friday February 20 2015, @02:58PM
At times as these I regret not having the "overrated" mod anymore. You made a fairly silly comment, which is aligned with the general opinion, and gets modded up as insightful...
You realized this later (see sibling), but I cannot, in good conscience, mod you Troll or Flamebait (as I think you simply did not check the FA yet), so the comment stands...
For the record: I dislike systemd. But I also see that some parts of it (specifically logind actually) are very useful and _better than what we had before_, as they provide a single backend for doing things that all DEs need. The only downside is that they rely on other parts of systemd that I am not too happy with.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Friday February 20 2015, @06:49PM
At times as these I regret not having the "overrated" mod anymore. You made a fairly silly comment, which is aligned with the general opinion, and gets modded up as insightful...
Meanwhile, the abusive down-modding that removing "overrated" was supposed to fix continues unabated with "redundant" or "troll."
(Score: 2) by arashi no garou on Friday February 20 2015, @07:04PM
Don't forget "Offtopic"; I've seen a few posts modded as such that were topical. I can only imagine it was someone who meant to hit that "Disagree" button and suddenly slipped...
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Friday February 20 2015, @10:05PM
Downmodders like to see the score go down. Disagree is a fail in that regard.
(Score: 2) by arashi no garou on Saturday February 21 2015, @01:55AM
That's the joke...
(Score: 2) by moondrake on Saturday February 21 2015, @09:21AM
Well, it does not make much sense to mod comments disagree when they contain a logical fallacy. Or when they ask questions that have been answered in the FA.
I would be happy if we had a 0 mod to point out such cases.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Friday February 20 2015, @07:25PM
You made a fairly silly comment, which is aligned with the general opinion, and gets modded up as insightful...
He asked a question not made a "fairly silly comment". Perhaps you could just answer the question.
(Score: 2) by moondrake on Saturday February 21 2015, @09:01AM
The question that he put in his comment was not a very good one because the FA addresses precisely this thing. The parts that KDE depends on is not the boot system, and this is clearly explained if you just read the article. (That you highlight this question again is simply beyond silly, and not insightful at all dear mods...).
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday February 21 2015, @05:57PM
The parts that KDE depends on is not the boot system,
Wasn't hard, was it?
(Score: 2) by moondrake on Saturday February 21 2015, @07:19PM
No, and Gaaark realized this long before you posted, which I referred to in my comment. I really do not see your point.
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Saturday February 21 2015, @08:22PM
No, and Gaaark realized this long before you posted, which I referred to in my comment. I really do not see your point.
Let's look at this as a timeline. A poster, Gaaark asks a reasonable question. Why does KDE depend on systemd? Let me remind you that not everyone is born with perfect knowledge of what systemd and its dependencies are.
Three minutes later he has an answer to his reasonable question and he posts it. Drama averted right? No, for you then post your condescending and useless reply a full hour and a half later.
So to summarize, your original reply adds nothing to the discussion aside from raising other peoples' blood pressure.
(Score: 2) by moondrake on Saturday February 21 2015, @08:58PM
I disagree. He did not read the article at the time of that first post. The answer to his question was in the FA. I pointed out that he should not have been modded up and had no way to correct it in a sensible way.
That comment was offtopic perhaps, but not totally without merit imho. I do not think calling his comment somewhat silly is condescending. I think it is a quite nice description for posting without reading what the story is about. My somewhat offtopic point was about the moderation and since I could not downmod, I could at least point out the post was not relevant for a sound discussion of the article. Moreover I raised the question of whether we do not need some mod system for this type of situation.
You on the other hand, did not read or understand the article, and posted a moronic reply (this is condescending yes, but by now I think you deserve it). Instead of silently ignoring my reply and not make matters worse for both of us, you resort to trolling (i.e. first you call me out to answer the question, then later argue my post was irrelevant to begin with). Discussion is over.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday February 21 2015, @09:10PM
I suggest the following two step approach:
1) Apologize.
2) STFU, unless you have something useful to say.
Now, having said that, I think it's time to take my own advice.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday February 20 2015, @08:59PM
I think your use of the word "only" unjustifiably trivializes the problem. Otherwise I pretty much agree.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.