[arch-projects] [initscripts] So it's gone

Tom Gundersen teg at jklm.no
Thu Feb 14 09:27:10 EST 2013


On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 2:28 PM, Ivailo <xakepa10 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> My general advice would be to find (or create) a fork not based on
>> systemdphobia, but on some practical need.
> Are you calling people who don't like systemd insane? Excuse me but you
> should pick your words more carefully. The fact that I don't agree with some
> implementations decisions about systemd makes me insane? Really?

No, I did not say that at all. If you have rational technical reasons
to disagree with systemd there is nothing wrong with that. However, a
lot of changes I see floating about in various forks are seemingly
based on a desire to avoid systemd at all cost, which is what I am
critical of.

> You probably know about the "LSD" thingy that is floating around the net but
> you don't know what I, one of the first to step into it, think about Arch
> Linux and the move to systemd. You know that many packages are linked
> against systemd so I've tried maintaining packages without systemd support,
> or rather that use other udev fork[3], and link packages against it.

In most cases there is no technical reason to avoid linking against
systemd. The only thing linking against systemd entails is that you'll
have a tiny library installed which will do nothing in case systemd
itself is not installed and running. From a technical point of view,
forking udev and rebuilding packages to avoid libsystemd-daemon.so is
a complete waste of time.

Similarly, reimplementing in bash what various systemd tools does for
you (tmpfiles++) also does not make any sense from a technical point
of view. At best all you have achieved is to duplicate the exact same
functionality, but more likely you have introduced some bugs or
incompatibilities.

Of course, you are free to do all these things. But if your only
reason is "i don't want anything from the systemd porject installed on
my machine", then I stand by my claim that it is irrational, and that
people would be better off using a different project.

> But
> that was because systemd was already in place and even the initscripts rely
> on it being installed and some packages shipped in the repositories didn't
> support other authentication methods other than the systemd-logind. But
> keeping up with Arch Linux was not easy, I was maintaining ~200 packages and
> when/if I don't catch up with Arch Linux upgrades things started falling
> apart.

Maintaining 200 packages was definitely unnecessary, at worst you
should have needed to maintain about four (and now also the rc
scripts).

> So I've decided to rely on my own and make my own distribution. But
> there are some things you don't know about the LSD distribution, probably
> because you haven't searched for more information about it, please read
> http://less-systemd-gnulinux.wikia.co/wiki/Frequently_Asked_Questions#How_is_it_different_than_the_other_.28hundreds.29_of_distributions_out_there.3F
>  to find out what I think even Arch Linux is missing/doing wrong and then
> judge my work and me personally.

The link was broken, but I think I found the page you intended to link
to (.com rather than .co).

It was not easy to follow your FAQ, in particular how you differ from
Arch. I guess this could be what you mean: "some god damn rules are
borke", but it wasn't really specific enough for me to understand.
Also you appear to "ship correct manual pages, not like Arch Linux". I
don't know what to make of that...

Good luck,

Tom


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