On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 10:02:57PM +0200, fredbezies wrote:
Last threads on systemd was useless.
I disagree. In the last thread, I had to really dig for outside information to understand both sides of the argument. My research and tinkering has lead me to the following valuable conclusions:
Init scripts are wrong.
Sure, you can say they're adequate, that things start-up as you want them to. But that's not the same as them being right. They're gratuitously stateful, they leave you with a lot of uncertain state (can has idempotence?), they are large amounts of delicate code that only provide the illusion of stability because they've been so prolific and so heartily tested by a bounteous supply of users.
systemd is also wrong.
Pretty much, all anybody can say about systemd is that it isn't init scripts. This much is certainly true. It still does unnecessary parsing (place for bugs to lurk), it is highly coupled (having dependency on outside software including the kernel), and it goes to unnecessary lengths to nurture sloppy daemon developers.
The arch dev's are making the right call.
They can't maintain a fork of all the software that's going to be coupled to systemd. We're going to have to accept it sooner or later. systemd isn't really any better but I'm unsure if it's any worse. It's okay if we move the bugs into a place that upstream is more inclined to look at and fix.
I certainly can't disagree with Toms opinion for Arch having an easier life. Hopefully any decent software will maintain compatibility with systemd less systems as systemd is intended to be only compatible with Linux and is completely incompatible with the deeply embedded Linux systems which are gaining momentum and often only have vfork and little memory or time to read it often requiring minimised libc and shells. I'm quite confident that compatibility will persist to a similar level as BSD is so heavily used by ISP and academic institutions and even NASA and Gnome3 going Linux only came to it's senses eventually. When systemd is brought up again I think these links from arguments between redhat developers will be good to further sum up and keep this list quieter. http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2011-June/152635.html http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2011-June/152636.html -- _______________________________________________________________________ 'Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface' (Doug McIlroy) _______________________________________________________________________