10 Myths About Systemd

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 11:08:00AM -0500, Christopher Browne wrote:
> The most cogent counterargument that I have seen is this one:
> 
> <http://www.pappp.net/?p=969>
> 
> There are definitely some things there worth quibbling with.
> 
> The notable one is where PAPPP complains:
>   "This program is not intended to be used by scripts or other programs"
> 
> That would be fair comment were it not that there's an intended "out"
> for scripts and other programs to use, namely udisks2-daemon
> 
> There are complaints about udisks2-daemon:
> http://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/03/11/udisks2-another-loss-for-linux/
> 
> I'm not sure (see docs:
> <http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/udisks2-20110628/udisksctl.1.html>)
> if it is the case that the "published accesses" are inadequate.
> 
> There's also a "flame war" that has harvested things that seem worth
> looking at: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4383243>
> 
> I think it's a fascinating idea to consider replacing traditional init
> with something else, and have long thought it to be so.  But it's not
> obvious to me that the direction taken with systemd is quite right.
> It sure looks like it's being created for the convenience of certain
> applications, rather than broad improvement of the "initialization
> condition," which seems wrong.

I think the current problem is that udev is pretty much necesary on all
systems these days.  systemd certainly is not, and there are plenty of
other valid options for systems to use instead.

The systemd (and udev now) maintainers have already shown quite clearly
that they don't care about breaking peoples systems if anyone does things
differently than the maintainers think it should be done.  They have
clearly shown they have no interest in what anyone else thinks (such
as the request that it should be possible to take the source tree and
just configure, compile and install udev without the rest of the crap,
to which the maintainers have said "NO".  They expect you to build
everything and then just install udev which is a huge waste for many
situations).

More debateable is that some (at least one) of the main developers of
systemd have previously shown on other projects (like pulseaudio) that
they are not capable of writing stable software that always works and
that they really don't care what anyone else thinks or wants.

Why should people be willing to accept udev being tied into systemd and
everything else given how it is being maintained and by who?

Maybe systemd will turn out to be good for many situations, and will
solve a lot of problems.  That doesn't excuse the way it is currently
being developed and handled.  I can see why some people want to rescue
udev from the systemd project.

It just seems way too much like gnome 3 except this is way more important
than gnome.

-- 
Len Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists