undefined | Better HN

0 pointsbrmgb6y ago0 comments

> Red Hat wanted it done

Red Hat had zero interest into a new init system when Lennart started systemd. They had just moved to upstart and Red Hat customers don't really care about init systems. Red Hat customers pay for their systems to be stable and to have someone to call when something goes wrong.

Systemd gives Red Hat no competitive advantage whatsoever.

I'm probably not going to make myself a lot of friends by saying this but I don't really understand the systemd opponents.

The components systemd is slowly replacing or sitting on top, most of the low level userspace of linux, is mostly garbage and poorly documented garbage at that. PAM is aweful. I don't even want to talk about ConsoleKit. Cron has one of the worst configuration format ever and I'm certainly not going to miss fstab. I would find journald a step in the right direction even if the only thing it brought to the table was the ability to configure logging from the service file and not have to fiddle with logrotate.

Networkd gives you a nice, uniform and well documented way to configure both interfaces, rules, custom routing tables and vpn tunnels from declarative files. Who in their right mind can miss the hodgepodge of scripts that was there before ?

0 comments

kbenson6y ago

> I'm probably not going to make myself a lot of friends by saying this but I don't really understand the systemd opponents.

I think sections 3.5 and 3.6 (all of them, including subsections outlines current problems pretty clearly. Summarized, systemd is complex to reason about, ambiguous in how it functions, and poorly documented in many cases. All the very similar directives with slight nuances paint a picture of people that didn't really understand the problem space as well as they thought they did (and to be fair, nobody did, and they probably had the best understanding, as woefully inadequate as it was). For a sysadmin, who rarely (but not never!) has to dive into the intricacies of unit files and the myriad directives and their nuanced behavior for creating a server but less rarely is affected by odd behavior introduced by systemd, it's a liability.

What we have now is a chance to learn from those missteps and build something even better. Systemd as a catalyst for rapid chance was wildly successful. As an init system that capitalizes on those changes in a way that users (that is, system/distro packagers) can take advantage of, not so much, since it's so wildly complex. The article posits that BPF will be used to create programs to take over some of these tasks, which may be right. Alternatively, we could start pulling out the components that systemd subsumed, and formalizing them into new standards that others could develop for. Whether that means actually pulling out the component (e.g. logind) to a new repo, or just formalizing API is up for debate.

krzyk5y ago

> Cron has one of the worst configuration format ever and I'm certainly not going to miss fstab. I would find journald a step in the right direction even if the only thing it brought to the table was the ability to configure logging from the service file and not have to fiddle with logrotate.

What you don't like about cron format? It is nice, consistent. Same for fstab, the only issue I have with it that e.g. Debian doesn't handle mounting network filesystems after the network is up (there are a couple of those and it shouldn't be hard to just grep the file for those).

As for journald, as long as they keep my log files in /var/log in pure text format it can stay.

The issue I have with systemd is that it tries to fiddle with my files, last year I noticed that /etc/resolv.conf contains some strange line with local resolver, WTF? I didn't install one for sure so why (and it was breaking my network).