
A word about systemd - awll
https://skarnet.org/software/s6/systemd.html
======
taylodl
I have a quibble with the following statement:

 _" It's as if we had learned nothing from the mistakes of the past 20
years."_

My quibble is it's as if we had learned nothing from the mistakes of the last
_40_ years, not 20. The problem I see with the whole discussion/argument
around systemd is it ignores there's two philosophies in computer science,
which for convenience sake I'll call the Unix way and the Windows way. I
believe the reason so many people, especially us old-timers, are railing
against systemd is because it adheres to the Windows way. The problem is
there's a lot of Windows people who've now migrated over to Linux and so they
love it. It's like Linux has been gentrified and we've all been kicked out of
our homes. At least that's why I think people are so intensely emotional about
this subject.

As for me, I've decided the hell with it. If Linux now wants to follow the
Windows way and adopt systemd - there's nothing I can do about it. It's not
even really my fight. I had nothing to do with the creation or maintenance of
Linux, GNU, the init tools, etc. Though it's all free I've decided to vote
with my time and usage - and that now goes to BSD. So long as BSD follows the
Unix way I'll stick with it. Maybe you'll join me, maybe you won't. You use
what you want to use and I'll use what I want to use. Peace.

~~~
theamk
How is having every single daemon implement setuid, chroot, logging, privilege
dropping and so on "unix way"?

Right now, every biggish daemon has to implement the same old logic in a
slightly different way. How many logging systems and files do you know?

I am totally looking for more programs to use systemd's socket activation.
This is the true Unix way -- a server should do only one thing (serve), and
not worry about logging, uids, and other system peculiarities.

(yeah, we could do it with daemontools as well.. but no one did the hard job
of converting thousands of packages to daemontools)

~~~
taylodl
The biggest problem with systemd is it purported itself to be an init system -
and then set out to do a whole lot more. That's where it abandons the Unix
way, as far as I'm concerned. But you like it and the Linux community overall
seems to like it. That's fine. That just means I'm no longer in synch with the
Linux community - I'm not aligned with their vision - so I'm leaving it. I no
longer have any hard feelings about it. I don't feel my 25 years of using
Linux have been "wasted." It worked well for what I needed it for but now it's
time for me to move on. So I am.

~~~
theamk
I am not sure who said that systemd was just an init system. While the very
first blog post did call it so, it is certainly not described as such now:

    
    
        Package: systemd
        Description-en: system and service manager
    

"systemd is a suite of basic building blocks for a Linux system. It provides a
system and service manager that runs as PID 1" (from
[https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/](https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/))

In any case, Linux is not systemd yet. You still have Arch and Gentoo at
least. You will miss out the latest security features, but presumably you
would not want to do this anyway.

~~~
saghm
> In any case, Linux is not systemd yet. You still have Arch and Gentoo at
> least.

Out of curiosity, what do you mean by this? Arch has used systemd as the
default for over six years now
([https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/systemd](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/systemd)),
and switching to something else is not officially supported (although
technically possible).

~~~
JdeBP
It is possible, indeed. (-:

* [https://framagit.org/taca/archnosh](https://framagit.org/taca/archnosh)

------
theamk
moderators: can you add [2016] to the title?
[https://web.archive.org/web/20160308042800/https://skarnet.o...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160308042800/https://skarnet.org/software/s6/systemd.html)

------
ilayn
Software people will never learn to argue to the point and to provide
comparisons without sprinkling insults to the other party.

