Systemd Rolls Out Its Own Mount Tool

[starshipeleven]

if your fork is good, everyone will switch to it

(what happened with Ubuntu vs Linux Mint, just to make an obvious example)

[starshipeleven]

To be fair that was a statement in response to someone else's. I don't actually use systemd, so it's not my problem atm.

Aren't you an enthusiast that had to work on your edge cases on your own?
Or did you choose Gentoo by chance?
No! You did it because you have very special requirements, and one of them is also not having systemd.

[stefansaraev]

(what happened with Ubuntu vs Linux Mint, just to make an obvious example)

imo, there is exactly one good reason for a regular joe to use mint instead of buntu. cinnamon. because unity makes no sense. but well, that's not relevant to the whole systemd discussion.

I am (was) using mint btw, because cinnamon vs unity. but it's not really mint what I use (and I am not the regular joe), it's ubuntu, oh wait..

[duby229]

Aren't you an enthusiast that had to work on your edge cases on your own?
Or did you choose Gentoo by chance?
No! You did it because you have very special requirements, and one of them is also not having systemd.

I've been a linux user for longer than systemd existed. I started with Redhat in 98, used that till 2004 when I installed FreeBSD to learn about it and quickly dumped that in favor of Gentoo. Edge case? No, not at all. Sure I get to choose what packages are installed and I can tweak use flags to get it closer to ideal. But that's what gentoo is for. It's not an edge, it's the whole point.

Which btw has nothing at all to do with systemd.

[stefansaraev]

I've been a linux user for longer than systemd existed. I started with Redhat in 98, used that till 2004 when I installed FreeBSD to learn about it and quickly dumped that in favor of Gentoo. Edge case? No, not at all. Sure I get to choose what packages are installed and I can tweak use flags to get it closer to ideal. But that's what gentoo is for. It's not an edge, it's the whole point.

Which btw has nothing at all to do with systemd.

say no more. I was a hardcore gentoo user (from gentoo's day one). still having few gentoo machines doing specific tasks..

wanting to use logind on non-systemd distro is an edge case, iirc we already agreed to not disagree on this

[stefansaraev]

and. as a gentoo user, you are supposed to know what the heck you are doing!!

[stefansaraev]

and, hey, I had to test freebsd one week ago, just to make sure an ipv6 dhcpd pd bug I had was not linux specific. I can tell you that it's horrible, their "init system" is same, and as bad as I tested it last time (15+ years ago)

[starshipeleven]

Edge case? No, not at all. Sure I get to choose what packages are installed and I can tweak use flags to get it closer to ideal. But that's what gentoo is for. It's not an edge, it's the whole point.
Which btw has nothing at all to do with systemd.

Gentoo is usually regarded as the "distro for edge-case enthusiasts", even Arch is.
Most people don't feel like all the stuff Gentoo offers is necessary, or worth it.
Not that this makes Gentoo any better or worse. Just stating that the whole point of Gentoo is to cater edge-case enthusiasts.

[starshipeleven]

and, hey, I had to test freebsd one week ago, just to make sure an ipv6 dhcpd pd bug I had was not linux specific. I can tell you that it's horrible, their "init system" is same, and as bad as I tested it last time (15+ years ago)

Meh, "bad" depends from what you are doing with the system.
As I always say *BSDs are usually developed with CLASSICAL server use in mind. And as long as you use them for that, they are fine, and most (true) Veteran Unix Admins that (genuinely) don't understand why linux and why systemd, it's because they administer classical servers where it's not terribly necessary.

For classical server roles you have 3-4 services running AT MOST, and if ANY of them is broken you figure out pretty quickly.
webserver program = no webpages or issues in webpages
network = no ssh and no webpages (though this is rare, unless you did something stupid)
ssh = no ssh but you see webpages
specific other service = stuff calling it reports it's not working

Also, in classical server roles you DO FUCKING NOT reboot the server unless you are doing mainteneance, and when you are doing it there is always someone babysitting the box to make sure that all is ok before declaring it ready.

This also applies to embedded distros like LEDE/OpenWRT. Apart from the fact that they don't really have the space for a 2-3MB binary in devices that have like 8MB of space on flash, that's the same, you have like 2-3 daemons running networking stuff and a lightweight webserver for the GUI (plus secondary daemons of course).

For a desktop use this is not the case.
You are running like 20 or more random programs no certified system administrator chose and installed, the quality of the programs and their trustworthyness is unknown.
This is where the adage of "I don't care of anything that isn't starting services" of older initsystems fails hard. Shit breaks, and often. How you find out? The only daemon in the system that could know (the init) isn't caring, so you need to debug, and hope that whatever logging the application likes to do is enough.

Also on more modern server use the classical usage isn't always the case anymore, on cloud applications for example you run bunches of apps made by who the fuck knows, in the same server(s), and you must be able to keep a shitty app from crashing down the whole cloud (and if things go wrong you need to KNOW who did that so you can notify him to go fix his shit, and add some profanity to the message if he is a known offender).
Or if you virtualize, same thing. Hypervisors are OK but containers have better performance for most server loads where you need 500 instances of the same fucking thing, instead of 500 full-blown VMs with their own kernel talking to a hypervisor just to run a webserver or a javaVM or whatever.

Again in virtualizing we see why systemd is so aggressive on boot times. As for containers yes it fucking matters, that's not "boot up" but "application startup times".

And again, this mount tool is also for these usecases. Most of what systemd does is for server usecase.

[Amarildo]

if your fork is good, everyone will switch to it

Correct. But does that apply do systemd? Because I'm sure there could be tons of good forks that don't make systemd such a hard dependency, yet it would be very hard to convince distros to switch in the first place. It would, initially, create too much effort duplication: on one side, people would already be coding systemd and distro developers would be working along with it; and on the other side, people would be working on a fork of systemd, and distro developers would be moving to it. That falls exactly on one of my previous comments where I ask if it's actually a good idea to fork a project every time we find something wrong with it, instead of pressuring the developers to make the software work as we want.