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depontius Advocate
Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 3525
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Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2014 12:37 pm Post subject: |
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NeddySeagoon wrote: | depontius,
Its just a rerun of the demise of the proprietary workstation vendors mentioned in the passing.
I can remember Apollo, so I've seen it all before. |
I'm not sure how to respond to that. Unfortunately wrt Linux I fear it's in the process of going wrong, specifically in the area of that original LKML link.
I tend to take a somewhat zen-ish attiude toward a lot of this kind of stuff - "In your victory are the seeds of your defeat, and in your defeat are the seeds of your victory." Some of this attitude actually comes from Biblical reading - the Hebrew nation could handle any adversity - except prosperity. In the Biblical/historical sense, it seemed that every time they were prosperous with secure borders, they strayed from their religious path. They worshiped the gods of their neighbors, and fell within a few generations.
IMHO what is happening now is that Linux has attracted users and developers who learned computing and computing attitudes on Windows, and are now bringing that with them. By sheer numbers "the Unix way" is getting shuffled aside. Set that against a background where the value of open standards has been under assult for decades across the board - not just in computing. Take a look at you car... About the only open standards left are the nuts and bolts, and even those have gone proprietary some of the time, and need special tools a disturbing fraction of the time. Many cars have i-jacks so you can directly plug in your i-pod - an only an i-device. Along that line, there is so much i-worship these days that most people don't even find the demise of open standards a problem, rather they celebrate it, along with the next i-thing.
History repeats herself because nobody listened the first time. (or first N times) _________________ .sigs waste space and bandwidth |
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Sulman n00b
Joined: 15 Feb 2014 Posts: 63
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Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2014 6:03 pm Post subject: |
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depontius wrote: |
IMHO what is happening now is that Linux has attracted users and developers who learned computing and computing attitudes on Windows, and are now bringing that with them. By sheer numbers "the Unix way" is getting shuffled aside. |
I think this is very accurate. I was a big fan of systemd, but I've really had second thoughts this last couple of weeks, especially in reading some debates. My initial instinct was people fearing change; it's very common, and progress is typically met with friction. However, I realised while eating lunch in the park what was bothering me: Linux is heading towards becoming an open source analogue of Windows, with all the bad things this entails. It is happening because people don't know better, and don't want to know better. Ubuntu was an early indicator of this trend; give me it easy, give me it pretty, just give me it free. Red Hat's strategy is surely a textbook example of embrace, extend, and extinguish. How soon before the graphics stack, package management and system security are on the campaign map, and how soon before that is locked in by dependencies, too? What about DRM from third parties that is developed in conjuction with such applications? Sure you don't have to use it...but, well, you know how that goes.
Secondly, philosophical arguments (e.g. the much vaunted 'UNIX way') are being met with technical arguments: systemd is a big technical step, therefore it must be progress. These are difficult to refute, unless you're versed in the philosophical toolkit (I am not) and you've taken a step back and looked at the big picture, specifically the history of UNIX/GNU Linux and why it became so prolific (Neddy's link is a great read).
I'm hoping the community finds a way. They usually do. Another argument I keep seeing is that systemd has no competitor, and as long as this is the case it will continue to flourish; but here's the nub: What if you don't believe it needs a competitor? |
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mv Watchman
Joined: 20 Apr 2005 Posts: 6780
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Posted: Wed Aug 20, 2014 9:29 am Post subject: |
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Sulman wrote: | My initial instinct was people fearing change; |
This is what makes me sometimes so angry about systemd/*kit discussions: The fanboys claim people just to be old farts and to oppose the progress while actually all what is happening is that these attacked people see that this change is plain wrong and caused by dangerous/broken concepts.
This /usr thing is a very good example for this: The systemd/*kit guys have "defined away" booting. systemd is doing the actual booting in the very beginning in a non-configurable manner, and all of the rest it does is not related at all with booting but only managing and running daemons and other stuff not belonging to an init system like log management.
But, of course, booting cannot be "defined away": What they now have to require is that the actual booting must be managd in another way - by some scripts hacked together in an initrd, instead of being cleanly executed as in openc. Exactly that functionality which systemd was made to replace, it cannot replace. This was obvious from the very beginning, but all the people who pointed out the broken concept of systemd as an init-system, were defamed as opposing the necessary changes for progress. |
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tld Veteran
Joined: 09 Dec 2003 Posts: 1850
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Posted: Wed Aug 20, 2014 1:50 pm Post subject: |
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mv wrote: | This is what makes me sometimes so angry about systemd/*kit discussions: The fanboys claim people just to be old farts and to oppose the progress while actually all what is happening is that these attacked people see that this change is plain wrong and caused by dangerous/broken concepts. | Oh yea...if I f****** hear that crap one more time. Speaking of broken concepts, aside from the fact that the very use of binary format logs (case in point, the Windows Event Log) is an entirely broken concept to begin with, I was stunned the other day when I saw this one, which was linked from the boycottsystemd.org site:
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=64116
So apparently, since the logging uses a database without ACID-compliant transactions, which can cause corrupt logs, the answer to the issue is literally "ignore it" and, from the all-knowing master LP himself "they are nothing we really need to fix hence". Call me an old fart...but these guys are clueless to an extent that defies the imagination.
Tom |
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tld Veteran
Joined: 09 Dec 2003 Posts: 1850
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depontius Advocate
Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 3525
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Posted: Wed Aug 20, 2014 6:26 pm Post subject: |
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All of this is before anything really bad happens... _________________ .sigs waste space and bandwidth |
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RazielFMX l33t
Joined: 23 Apr 2005 Posts: 835 Location: NY, USA
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tld Veteran
Joined: 09 Dec 2003 Posts: 1850
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Posted: Wed Aug 20, 2014 8:10 pm Post subject: |
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depontius wrote: | All of this is before anything really bad happens... | Yup. I'm still convinced that at some point after RHEL 7 starts getting rolled out, the s*** is really gonna hit the fan the first time there's a significant zero-day exploit in that overly complex mess...especially given the odds that it'll be something related to functionality that doesn't belong within 1000 miles of a server. I can tell you this, if I were one of those serious black hat types...the ones that make big bucks for stuff like industrial espionage level hacking, I'd be combing that mess right now for undiscovered exploits. I'll bet that's going on as we speak. |
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Sulman n00b
Joined: 15 Feb 2014 Posts: 63
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Posted: Wed Aug 20, 2014 8:33 pm Post subject: |
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tld wrote: | depontius wrote: | All of this is before anything really bad happens... | Yup. I'm still convinced that at some point after RHEL 7 starts getting rolled out, the s*** is really gonna hit the fan the first time there's a significant zero-day exploit in that overly complex mess...especially given the odds that it'll be something related to functionality that doesn't belong within 1000 miles of a server. I can tell you this, if I were one of those serious black hat types...the ones that make big bucks for stuff like industrial espionage level hacking, I'd be combing that mess right now for undiscovered exploits. I'll bet that's going on as we speak. |
I wonder how many people would be a lot warmer towards systemd if the creators showed it a little love. They don't really seem to care. Passion is important in life, it's probably what brought us here in the first place.
Edit: Journalctl corruption: If you run systemd long enough, you'll hit that. It has happened to me a few times. Journactl does not handle it gracefully, it just hangs. |
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tld Veteran
Joined: 09 Dec 2003 Posts: 1850
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Posted: Wed Aug 20, 2014 9:01 pm Post subject: |
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Sulman wrote: |
I wonder how many people would be a lot warmer towards systemd if the creators showed it a little love. They don't really seem to care. Passion is important in life, it's probably what brought us here in the first place.
Edit: Journalctl corruption: If you run systemd long enough, you'll hit that. It has happened to me a few times. Journactl does not handle it gracefully, it just hangs. |
It would certainly help...for example if they'd made the whole thing modular, where you could at least choose not to use large parts of it (like journalctl for exampl) rather than having the whole thig forced on you. Having said that, it wouldn't change my view much, given how those folks have proven themselves to be totally clueless. But seriously, there's growing agreement that they seem to think they have all the answers for everyone, even when the answer is "we have no answer" as with the journal corruption.
Of course in that case, the real answer is "don't emulate Windows logging when 'nix logging has been better forever". |
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Anon-E-moose Watchman
Joined: 23 May 2008 Posts: 6188 Location: Dallas area
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Posted: Wed Aug 20, 2014 9:50 pm Post subject: |
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RazielFMX wrote: | Slightly off topic:I like how the article refers to Gentoo as the "old guard" (was created in 2002) yet Debian (which has moved to systemd) and Red Hat were created in 1993 |
It's philosophy more nearly matches the way things used to be done in the old days (beginning with suse, rh, etc).
It definitely gives the most end user choice nowadays.
I have several cd's worth of old RH, Suse, Mandrake, even a novell/caldera cd along with old bsd stuff.
Most of the time the cd's shipped not only with binaries but the source (in one form or another)
for everything so that it could be recompiled as needed.
I don't even know if any of them ship the source anymore. _________________ UM780, 6.12 zen kernel, gcc 13, openrc, wayland |
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krinn Watchman
Joined: 02 May 2003 Posts: 7470
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Posted: Wed Aug 20, 2014 11:46 pm Post subject: |
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Anon-E-moose wrote: | RazielFMX wrote: | Slightly off topic:I like how the article refers to Gentoo as the "old guard" (was created in 2002) yet Debian (which has moved to systemd) and Red Hat were created in 1993 |
It's philosophy more nearly matches the way things used to be done in the old days (beginning with suse, rh, etc).
It definitely gives the most end user choice nowadays.
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Or just as he speak about fedora in that context (and not redhat), so distros older than fedora can be called old guard. Fedora was made 6nov2003 from wikipedia. |
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mv Watchman
Joined: 20 Apr 2005 Posts: 6780
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Posted: Thu Aug 21, 2014 6:28 am Post subject: |
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Anon-E-moose wrote: | Most of the time the cd's shipped not only with binaries but the source (in one form or another) |
That's not a fair comparison. Nowadays, distributions just expect that you download things over the net instead of getting them on a CD. AFAIK, Gentoo does not ship sources, either. The necessity of a high-volume internet connection is actually one of the reasons why some people don't use gentoo, and I can understand them. |
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Anon-E-moose Watchman
Joined: 23 May 2008 Posts: 6188 Location: Dallas area
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Posted: Thu Aug 21, 2014 10:15 am Post subject: |
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mv wrote: | Anon-E-moose wrote: | Most of the time the cd's shipped not only with binaries but the source (in one form or another) |
That's not a fair comparison. Nowadays, distributions just expect that you download things over the net instead of getting them on a CD. AFAIK, Gentoo does not ship sources, either. The necessity of a high-volume internet connection is actually one of the reasons why some people don't use gentoo, and I can understand them. |
When I had used RH (many, many, many moons ago) I downloaded many SRPMS so that I could recompile the way I wanted.
I wasn't trying to make a comparison (with what's quoted) about cd's per se.
I'm not sure how easy it is to get source from any binary distro to recompile if needed (that was the point) not the medium.
I don't keep up with all the different distros now, so I don't know. _________________ UM780, 6.12 zen kernel, gcc 13, openrc, wayland |
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depontius Advocate
Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 3525
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Posted: Thu Aug 21, 2014 11:34 am Post subject: |
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Anon-E-moose wrote: |
When I had used RH (many, many, many moons ago) I downloaded many SRPMS so that I could recompile the way I wanted.
I wasn't trying to make a comparison (with what's quoted) about cd's per se.
I'm not sure how easy it is to get source from any binary distro to recompile if needed (that was the point) not the medium.
I don't keep up with all the different distros now, so I don't know. |
It must be possible to get the sources from any distribution, at least for the GPL parts. If they don't, they're violating the GPL. RedHat has come under some fire recently for only supplying patched kernel sources, rather than supplying pristine source + patches, which was the original idea behind SRPMs. So they can make it a little annoying, but they can't not supply sources. _________________ .sigs waste space and bandwidth |
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0x0065 n00b
Joined: 08 Apr 2007 Posts: 49
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Posted: Fri Aug 29, 2014 9:51 pm Post subject: |
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Looks like using systemd as an example was a mistake, as not fixating on it seems to be a real struggle for some.
Nobody wants to talk about the other examples of pure home grown gentoo goodness like packages requiring write access to function being installed in usr and then symlinked into var...
Can the autconf makefile configure script variables that control where packages build to be modified on a package by package basis without custom ebuilds? Clearly portage sets them to non-default somewhere, or we would be talking about why half the system is in /usr/local
Perhaps I should go and ask over in funtoo. Probably a deeper understanding of portage internals over there, i guess. |
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sera Retired Dev
Joined: 29 Feb 2008 Posts: 1017 Location: CET
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Posted: Fri Aug 29, 2014 10:45 pm Post subject: |
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0x0065 wrote: | Nobody wants to talk about the other examples of pure home grown gentoo goodness like packages requiring write access to function being installed in usr and then symlinked into var... | Please be explicit. I can't think of an example fitting your problem description.
0x0065 wrote: | Can the autconf makefile configure script variables that control where packages build to be modified on a package by package basis without custom ebuilds? Clearly portage sets them to non-default somewhere, or we would be talking about why half the system is in /usr/local | Are you talking about econf described in PMS?
0x0065 wrote: | Perhaps I should go and ask over in funtoo. Probably a deeper understanding of portage internals over there, i guess. | The only two I'd attest a deep understanding of Portage internals, zac and few, both aren't Funtoo users as far as I know. |
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0x0065 n00b
Joined: 08 Apr 2007 Posts: 49
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Posted: Fri Aug 29, 2014 10:59 pm Post subject: |
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Yes, point taken. I originally had a few other examples in a preview of the OP, including website ebuilds like moodle and the gentoo automagic website activator that install them to /usr then symlink to /var. Looks like I cut them out before actually posting. My bad.
Before we go around our little side track again, Im not saying that is right, just saying that it is.
Can I set the configure script environment variables in something like /etc/portage/package.env/ on a per package basis in a way that wont get clobbered by the ebuild script?
I would have thought drobbins has a fair idea how portage is supposed to work. |
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steveL Watchman
Joined: 13 Sep 2006 Posts: 5153 Location: The Peanut Gallery
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Posted: Mon Sep 01, 2014 9:25 am Post subject: |
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0x0065 wrote: | Can I set the configure script environment variables in something like /etc/portage/package.env/ on a per package basis in a way that wont get clobbered by the ebuild script? |
Yes, you can use EXTRA_ECONF for that purpose. It was specifically meant for the user, not the ebuild.
On the wider point, you can also move and symlink a couple of critical things from /usr to /, which has worked well here for the last couple of years, though configuration of some packages would be preferable, so I'd be interested to see how you do.
IMO everything required by POSIX-2 (shell and utilities) should be in the root /bin, as well as part of @system (Gentoo fails on latter wrt ed.) |
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0x0065 n00b
Joined: 08 Apr 2007 Posts: 49
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Posted: Mon Sep 01, 2014 10:13 am Post subject: |
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Thank you steveL. I'll give that a go on a play one when I get a sec. and let you know what happens.
My guess is that the big issues will be third party static paths. Your symlink idea sounds like an easy enough work around if something important breaks |
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EmaRsk Apprentice
Joined: 07 Sep 2004 Posts: 158 Location: Italy
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Anon-E-moose Watchman
Joined: 23 May 2008 Posts: 6188 Location: Dallas area
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Posted: Mon Sep 01, 2014 4:46 pm Post subject: |
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Sounds like a rehash of windows. _________________ UM780, 6.12 zen kernel, gcc 13, openrc, wayland |
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depontius Advocate
Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 3525
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Posted: Mon Sep 01, 2014 5:09 pm Post subject: |
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Anon-E-moose wrote: |
Sounds like a rehash of windows. |
Isn't that what many of us have been saying for months? _________________ .sigs waste space and bandwidth |
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Anon-E-moose Watchman
Joined: 23 May 2008 Posts: 6188 Location: Dallas area
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Posted: Mon Sep 01, 2014 5:52 pm Post subject: |
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depontius wrote: | Anon-E-moose wrote: |
Sounds like a rehash of windows. |
Isn't that what many of us have been saying for months? |
Yes, and I've been saying it for a while too, but I was referring specifically to the "campaign map" link _________________ UM780, 6.12 zen kernel, gcc 13, openrc, wayland |
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roki942 Apprentice
Joined: 18 Apr 2005 Posts: 285 Location: Seattle
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Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 2:29 am Post subject: |
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http://0pointer.net/blog/revisiting-how-we-put-together-linux-systems.html Quote: | I originally intended to discuss this at the Linux Plumbers Conference (which I assumed was the right forum for this kind of major plumbing level improvement), and at linux.conf.au, but there was no interest in my session submissions there... | Seems that went over his head |
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