The Politics of systemd Part 2

tld · Veteran Joined: 09 Dec 2003 Posts: 1845

Does anyone else think that Redhat is managing to game Goggles search, for example, when you search Google news for systemd? It sure seems that way to me. There was a time when doing that brought up all the critical articles etc, and very likely would have brought up things like the slashdot thread on that busybox commit.

Lately, searching Google news for systemd brings up just about nothing but pro-systemd softballs...currently at the top, an article on opensource.com titled "Why systemd is a practical tool for sys admins", followed by a ton of softball fluff pieces on softpedia.com. I mean FFS!...there's no way that's happening naturally with the level of controversy...I just don't buy it.

gwr · Apprentice Joined: 19 Nov 2014 Posts: 194

arnvidr · l33t Joined: 19 Aug 2004 Posts: 629 Location: Oslo, Norway

ddg top results are mostly from official pages and wikis, a few articles with "latest controversy", "harbinger of the apocalypse" and such. Been very happy with it unless I'm searching for something very obscure that google's crawlers might be able to better find for me.
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krinn · Watchman Joined: 02 May 2003 Posts: 7470

Thank you NeddySeagoon, there's just no better way to have that topic split and start with the busybox commit

steveL · Posted: Tue Nov 03, 2015 10:59 am Post subject:

Tony0945 · Posted: Tue Nov 03, 2015 3:14 pm Post subject:

depontius · Advocate Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 3522

Thinking back to "Unix Philosophy", something happened to a co-worker recently, and I helped him out, today.

Basically, I had a good idea what his problem was, and it was something that I'd fixed another time several years ago. Simply put, I'd forgotten what to do, I just knew that I had done it before, and had half an idea of where to start. But it was really no problem. I had a window open with a root prompt, and another window where I was perusing man pages, as needed. He was back and running in a few minutes.

This is a stupidly simple scenario - and that's the really good thing about it. It was discoverable, hackable, and all that stuff.

To be fair, I only ever ran systemd a few times, about three years ago. But I have on occasion fought with the XML mess that seems to pervade so many freedesktop.org tools, and it's anything but discoverable, hackable, and all that stuff. Everything I've read puts systemd squarely into that camp. With the freedesktop XML stuff, the answer seems so often to be a magic string whose value looks obvious once you've seen it, but there's never any idea of how to get there from knowing nearly noting. Like I just did with my co-worker's workstation.
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.sigs waste space and bandwidth

khayyam · Posted: Tue Nov 03, 2015 9:24 pm Post subject:

gwr · Apprentice Joined: 19 Nov 2014 Posts: 194

The videos from the first systemd conference have started being posted.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvq_RgZp3kljp9X8Io9Z1DA/videos

Tony0945 · Posted: Fri Nov 06, 2015 6:31 pm Post subject:

khayyam · Posted: Fri Nov 06, 2015 7:24 pm Post subject:

steveL · Posted: Fri Nov 06, 2015 7:58 pm Post subject:

I think Tony's point is the same as mine; the argument "that those individual tools didn't really combine very well" is completely false, prima facie for anyone who's ever used a *nix.

There's no need to analyse it on a deeper level: it's obviously horse-shit. ;)

If we want to explain why in a more basic fashion: it's because the whole of UNIX is about combining tools and their output as input to the next.

The reason it doesn't appeal to "rockstar" developers, is because they want to prove how important they are, by rewriting everything and showing how much code they've produced ("I made this!").

Whereas the older ones know that it's all about how little code, and time, you outlay. Because it's not about you: it's about the CPU, and if you can do it with the stdlib, or a standard library, rather than rewriting it all, then it will perform well.

On the one hand: think icache. More importantly: simple clean code, is much easier to optimise, in the very rare cases where you actually need to. (It opens the door to algorithmic optimisations, which are the most effective, and open up all the other ones.)
It's also much easier for the compiler to optimise the rest of the time, so it tends to run faster overall, and tends to stay fast when moved to another platform.

It still takes at least a decade to grow out of ego-attachment and the feeling that you need to produce more, which is so prevalent in every other part of society, when in fact you need to produce less, while still fulfilling the brief. (Necessary complexity.)

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Fri Nov 06, 2015 8:25 pm Post subject:

steveL · Posted: Sat Nov 07, 2015 8:26 am Post subject:

The first quote is more interesting when you supply it in full, and switch it round:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Nov 07, 2015 9:23 am Post subject:

steveL,

steveL · Posted: Sat Nov 07, 2015 11:28 am Post subject:

It's not an issue to (want to) speed these things up; the irrational part is listening to hoodoo about speeding up the wrong things, from people who could not code a shellscript efficiently, if their lives depended on it, and who clearly are still wet behind the ears, as well as in love with web-bloat, rather than crafted software.

Gossip is good and all, but I don't want to be treated by a surgeon who listens to gossip about how "hygiene is unnecessary", and follows fashion, rather than science.

Tony0945 · Posted: Sat Nov 07, 2015 3:21 pm Post subject:

orlfman · n00b Joined: 31 Jul 2006 Posts: 68

when systemd first came out i was extremely interested in it. the idea of it was great, and something linux needed. an updated init system that could easily replace sysvinit and finally bring more standardization across distros regarding the init system. linux was heavily fragmented in this regard. they all used sysvinit underneath but each had their own flavor.. enough flavors that made you sit there wondering why? did you really have to go that far just to be different?

when systemd came out it was great... it wasn't "bloat." it wasn't slow. but now... its grown... tremendously. incorporating so much stuff that its no longer a init system... but the system itself. people have been saying "whats next? the kernel being taken over by systemd?" when really its "when?"

they're making a lot of design choices that mimic windows... choices that even windows administrators absolutely hate. linux being modular is what makes it so great.

the problem wasn't the different flavors and modularity. the issue was going to far causing to much fragmentation. now with systemd its being to monolithic.
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Orlfman

digi_owl · n00b Joined: 04 Oct 2015 Posts: 9

Best i can tell, the reason outside devs disliked distro "fragmentation" was the issue of dependencies.

This because major distros could not make up their mind about package handling.

Should a upstream source archive that produce multiple binaries be treated as one package or multiple?

Never mind that all but a few have problems with library versions.

For most if you want to install libx-1.1 and libx-1.2 side by side, you have to pull crap like libx-1.1 and libx-1-1.2 when naming packages.

This is not a problem at the OS level, because it can use things like SONAME to keep the lib versions separate. Nope, it is squarely a package manager and package format issue.

And the "fix"? the fad of the day, container. Stuff everything every binary needs into its own container and call it a day.

You can really tell that most of the systemd people are coming out of desktop, web and devops backgrounds, slowly working their way down to the kernel with (free)desktop provided blinders firmly in place.

steveL · Posted: Sun Nov 08, 2015 12:18 pm Post subject:

Tony0945 · Posted: Sun Nov 08, 2015 6:35 pm Post subject:

Anon-E-moose · Posted: Mon Nov 09, 2015 10:43 am Post subject:

Was on one of the linux news sites this morning and ran across this link,
it does have to deal with a corporation that we mention regularly and
so IMO it does tie into the discussion about sysd/(k)dbus

http://www.fosspatents.com/2015/11/hypocritical-red-hat-hopes-to-leverage.html

digi_owl · n00b Joined: 04 Oct 2015 Posts: 9

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10519585

Some choice quotes from Poettering's systemd.conf keynote.