Official systemd flamewar fan thread

[waxhead]

I am getting a bit tired of seeing almost every forum post ending up in a systemd flamewar.
Let's hope the forum does not overflow on the number of posts... so here goes I'll get this started...:

While I may not like everything about systemd I don't mind at all that Debian switched to it , and it have actually made my life a bit easier. I like it more than I hate it!

Now it's your turn... don't hold back

[ldo17]

I run Debian Unstable. I do a dist-upgrade maybe once a month. Sometimes things break. For example, there was this period of a few months, some years ago (back when I had an Epson printer), when escputil (for checking ink levels, printing test pages etc) needed a particular USB-related kernel module loaded to work, but CUPS would not print while that module was loaded. (Or was it the other way round?) So I had to do a bit of juggling to switch between the different things I might want to do with the printer. Eventually the conflict was fixed.

But anyway--that was just an example of what life can be like on on the bleeding edge.

So they brought in systemd--I’m not sure when that happened, maybe a year or more ago. The interesting thing is, I never noticed exactly when it happened. One day I saw these “/run/user” directories show up in a df listing, and I thought to myself “that must be systemd”. That was it, really. All the text-based system log files were still there, and I could still start and stop services using the old commands. It was up to me to learn the new ways of doing things, at my leisure.

One of the new ways is using journalctl to look at logs. I can see the point of this, in that you can drill down to exactly which events you want to examine, without having to remember which particular logfile they will go to (auth.log? daemon.log?). I like the fact that timestamps are stored in UTC! The less concept of a “system” timezone we have, the better.

On the other hand, change can be an irritation sometimes. For example, mail-related messages used (and still do) go to mail.log. But with journalctl, as far as I can tell, you have to select messages based on the specific service name, e.g.

journalctl [email protected]

So the selection criterion would have to be different if you are running another MTA.

Handy tip:

journalctl -N

gives you a list of all the different field names that you can select on, while, for example,

journalctl -F _SYSTEMD_UNIT

shows you the different values that have been seen for that field (in this case, _SYSTEMD_UNIT).

Unfortunately, “journalctl -N” is not available with the version of systemd that is in the current Debian Stable.