Voting Proposed For Debian Jessie's Init System

[V10lator]

UNIX's principles remain just a point of view because they depend on what you mean for "do one thing". Does the Linux Kernel does a lot of things or just one: be the layer between you hardware and the rest of the stack?

Also we shouldn't forget that
a) "do one thing" is obsolete, even the person making this philosophy says so.
b) systemd is modular.

[erendorn]

And it took them FOUR years to say so? Why didn't they try to influence its development? Raise their concerns? And please don't hide behind the CLA. It is a simple stupid document that can be renegotiated between the companies and individuals willing to contribute since the start system is fundamental part of the OS. In the worst case scenario said individuals and companies can fork the original project and rename it to something else. Problem solved.

From my perspective this is another attempt to derail one company's effort and replace it with something own. It's not like it hasn't happened before. The latest upstart vs. systemd is nothing new on that front.

FOUR years?? Really?? More like THIRTY! Why didn't try to influence System V development? Outrageous! And obviously forking would have been better than a separate project, because then it would not have been a separate project. You know.

[panda84]

Yes, from a purely technical standpoint upstart isn't any better than systemd. But systemd is more dangerous because its developers are actively trying to make it a dependency for everything else. Not to mention they break UNIX principles at whim and seem to be proud of that.

For the UNIX part see #10:

http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html

For the "trying to make it a dependency" part, are you referring to something specifically?

[TheBlackCat]

But systemd is more dangerous because its developers are actively trying to make it a dependency for everything else.

Yes, they are holding a gun to the heads of KDE and Gnome developers and forcing them to use systemd. They blackmailed the udev developers into joining the project. Or maybe, just maybe, projects are using systemd and joining systemd because they see technical advantages to doing so.

[Pajn]

Yes, they are holding a gun to the heads of KDE and Gnome developers and forcing them to use systemd. They blackmailed the udev developers into joining the project. Or maybe, just maybe, projects are using systemd and joining systemd because they see technical advantages to doing so.

No one disagrees with that. But it would have been much better for the whole ecosystem
if they instead developed standardized interfaces that any program could provide.

[jonnor]

No one disagrees with that. But it would have been much better for the whole ecosystem
if they instead developed standardized interfaces that any program could provide.

Tons of the functionality in systemd is provided by interfaces that other software could provide. It is even well documented:

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/InterfacePortabilityAndStabilityChart/

[silix]

UNIX's principles remain just a point of view because they depend on what you mean for "do one thing". Does the Linux Kernel does a lot of things or just one: be the layer between you hardware and the rest of the stack?
So, all depends about what is your project's mission because, to reach your target, you could be forced to do "a lot of things" under the hood.

this

besides not being some kind of holy law to be followed blindly, what the "do one thing and do it well" (*) thing was intended for, was userland command line primitives (as in tools implementing a single operation) to be chained together to achieve complex tasks
what rich gui applications have made obsolete to a certain extent - it's still useful to have them supported, but you cannot really expect users at large to do things only by piping stuff back and forth via shell scripts, nowadays..)

* and, if you have to quote it, quote it fully, including the part which may imply correctness as well as completeness (so if the "one thing" is "managing services" all aspects of service startup / shutdown /monitoring / configuration /logging / .. are to be implemented)

[gens]

Yes, they are holding a gun to the heads of KDE and Gnome developers and forcing them to use systemd. They blackmailed the udev developers into joining the project. Or maybe, just maybe, projects are using systemd and joining systemd because they see technical advantages to doing so.

bouth Lennart and Kay are huge proponents and contributors of GnomeOS
if i were to be cynical id say it was their goal with systemd all along

[gens]

Well, this is not true.
They (systemd's devs) cannot make systemd a dependecy for everything, because they are not the mainteiners of the other project.
What they can certainly do is to provide a continuos flow of new, elegant, robust features. When the other projects' mainteiners look to those features can decide to use one or more of them, then, and only then, the systemd starts to be a dependecy for those projects.
Do you recognize the difference?
UNIX's principles remain just a point of view because they depend on what you mean for "do one thing". Does the Linux Kernel does a lot of things or just one: be the layer between you hardware and the rest of the stack?
So, all depends about what is your project's mission because, to reach your target, you could be forced to do "a lot of things" under the hood.

the Unix kernel also does/did many things
thing with the linux kernel is that it has very strict standards (ask Kay about that)
also the way the kernel is designed shows care that things dont have idiotic dependancies
(you can for example swap the scheduler, a key component, for some other, that you can't do with systemd)

so if systemd (the kernel in userspace) was designed in the stile of the linux kernel, you could take idk logind and use it without systemd (only thing userspace is really dependant on is the kernel)
but you can't

people, wiki for separation of concerns
its a standard strategy

[prodigy_]

They (systemd's devs) cannot make systemd a dependecy for everything

Fortunately, that's true. But what part of "trying to" you don't understand?

What they can certainly do is to provide a continuos flow of new, elegant, robust features.

Wow, just wow. You're from Red Hat PR department, aren't you?

b) systemd is modular.

Yeah. A manually-patch-and-recompile-everything-to-make-it-modular kind of modular.

/facepalm