Joey Hess Resigns From Debian, Unhappy With How It's Changed

[ceage]

fiasco [...] screams [...] anger [...] disaster [...] angry [...] infest [...] cries [...] pain [...] rip [...] garbage [...] wasted [...] dumb

[curaga]

sane_system_admin's_reaction_to_systemd.gif

[MoonMoon]

i start rtorrent manually, not the init (it can't even be controlled without a terminal)
and that is not the solution even if the init did start it

hacks ?
systemd wouldn't start the program if i told it to do that, and it would probably hang until timeout as some people write

Hardly systemd's fault if such a program lacks a feature to start it daemonized (seriously, why?). But you can easily use screen or tmux to start it, examples for that here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...tmux_or_screen

[stevenc]

So it's more like a Debian packaging/integration issue, but it sucks.

You upgrade from wheezy to jessie, because you want to have the supported stable release or just to get newer versions of your applications. You're given systemd. You try to finish the upgrade and reboot, but instead suffer from one or more of:
* network manager reset your network config so you lost remote access
* systemd drops to single user because of some stale entry in your /etc/fstab that was never an issue before
* the rescue shell doesn't actually work, ignores some/all of your keystrokes at random
* if you had cryptdisks, it's impossible to enter a password, or the configuration is missing from your initrd
* if you use rare filesystems or had things on NFS mounts, that needs configuring again the systemd way

You complain, but you're told by systemd proponents that you should have RTFM for it. But you didn't want it in the first place. You argue that switching to systemd as default, is going to be upgrade hell for many more people when Debian jessie is released; you're told you're a troll, you don't contribute enough for your opinions to matter, your beard is too long, you get in the way of development work on the new shiny, or your views are toxic and are causing good people to leave the project. etc.

Debian jessie is cursed.

[interested]

So it's more like a Debian packaging/integration issue, but it sucks.

You upgrade from wheezy to jessie, because you want to have the supported stable release or just to get newer versions of your applications. You're given systemd. You try to finish the upgrade and reboot, but instead suffer from one or more of:
* network manager reset your network config so you lost remote access
* systemd drops to single user because of some stale entry in your /etc/fstab that was never an issue before
* the rescue shell doesn't actually work, ignores some/all of your keystrokes at random
* if you had cryptdisks, it's impossible to enter a password, or the configuration is missing from your initrd
* if you use rare filesystems or had things on NFS mounts, that needs configuring again the systemd way

You complain, but you're told by systemd proponents that you should have RTFM for it. But you didn't want it in the first place. You argue that switching to systemd as default, is going to be upgrade hell for many more people when Debian jessie is released; you're told you're a troll, you don't contribute enough for your opinions to matter, your beard is too long, you get in the way of development work on the new shiny, or your views are toxic and are causing good people to leave the project. etc.

Debian jessie is cursed.

So you upgrade to an unstable beta release of Jessie and are having problems? Well, this is what beta releases are all about; file bug reports, and please read the release notes before a major OS upgrade.

Don't want systemd? Don't use Debian Jessie. Debian Jessie is a systemd distro. Yes, SysVinit is still supported, but this will only be temporary no matter what the GR result will be; in the long term SysVinit will prove too hard to support in order to satisfy a very small group of people that don't contribute to the development of non-systemd infrastructure.

Really, you guys should just fork Debian to a pure SysVinit distro; that way you can have things exactly like you will.

[old486whizz]

The ignorance of the 'SYS admins' here (I put them in quotes as the are probably overpaid contractors that don't actually like tech - probably use numerous windows or Mac products etc, and love hacking things together as they think they are technical gods.. I've worked along many of these and the quality of these people show).

I have a response to all you systemd haters out there: technology changes. No honestly, upgrade versions of software, replace open office with libre office, etc etc.. You will need to change things.
If you don't factor upgrade tasks into the equation and expect things to work after you upgrade then he out of the business that you shouldn't be in in the first place.
Along the same lines, why are you upgrading between OS versions anyway?
I know you *can* do it, but with so many underlying changes in any OS, you should be rebuilding it. The OS should be on its own set of partitions, your config management should be stored elsewhere (puppet/version control).. The data should be on separate disks, or on LUNs, etc. A rebuild should take 10 minutes, should be performed routinely and hell, major upgrades should *always* be done on mirrored boxes and not the actual servers - is this amateur hour!?
Also, I love the 'systemd should cope with errors like the old incorrect method did' statement.. I also enjoyed it when you could open the washing machine door mid cycle and throw in one sock you forgot - who cared about safety, a dry floor and other clothes flying out? And who cares that you were running your car on 4 flat tyres and didn't notice until you got 1 of them replaced - it should still act the same!! Oh and valves were way more simple to replace and understand without putting any thought into it than capacitors - let's go back to them for our PCs!

Systemd actually does things technically correctly for LINUX... Not for BSD. Not for Windows. Not for AIX, Solaris, Tru64, osX, AmigaOS, or <insert random OS here>. If things were wrong before (see weird setup scenarios) then they will be highlighted as such... Try to learn from this. Learn how to do things correctly. See this as an opportunity to fix the way your systems have been in the past, looking to the future. Thinking your hoaky shell script written 5 years ago should not be reviewed and replaced by correct solutions is not a failure of systemd.
Upgrading software can, as described, cause config errors to rise to the surface in any piece of software.

Can anyone come up with a single valid point against systemd which isn't based on personal opinion of 'oh but change is bad'?

[Luke]

I just switched TO Debian due to issues at Ubuntu

Not knowing what the future holds at Ubuntu, I have just about finished a difficult cross-distro conversion of what was a heavily hacked Ubuntu system to the same system on Debian Unstable. No beefs with Ubuntu, just have different needs that do not include devices I do not own. Still, as someone who always treated Ubuntu alphas as a rolling release, used a lot of PPA's to use newer stuff, imported binaries from Arch, and now build more and more from source so I can hack on it, I felt a true rolling distro better suited my needs. At first I thought of rebuilding on Gentoo, but compiling everything new on a rolling bases, including hundreds of packages not being hacked, would probably use too much CPU time.

Debian is well suited to my noncommerical philosophy and hopefully will provide a good base for what I build on top of it.

[Rich Oliver]

Well first let me thank the above posters for finally giving me a systemd debate I, could understand. Desktop Linux is quite tricky, because on the whole you want to forget about the operating system and use applications. So you only start poking around when the distro fails. Where as for someone running a server, it is worth the time to really understand how their Linux operating works. It may seem obvious to the initiated, but it never occurred to me that both sysv and systemd use fstab and might interpret them differently.

Because I install quite a lot of Linux laptops for non technical people I've been trying to shift from Suse to Kubuntu. Unfortunately the Ubuntu installer is utter crap and doesn't even give you the option to change the fstab partition options.

[ArchLinux]

Unfortunately the Ubuntu installer is utter crap and doesn't even give you the option to change the fstab partition options.

As you can see, I don't use Ubuntu, but if you think hiding /etc/fstab in the greatest noob distribution of Linux is "utter crap", you don't know what you're talking about.

That might make it "utter crap" for you, but as you can see, luckily there are people we don't listen to.