Canonical Releases Upstart 1.10 Init Daemon

[ninez]

You can't seriously judge the overall stability of Ubuntu (or any other distro) by testing a development release.
And, in this case, 13.10 is not even "feature-frozen", witch means that the bug-fixing sprint did not even start.

12.04 was no better... and as someone who (used to) actively participate in Compiz development (during that cycle); 12.04 was even worse than 13.10 :\ - which is embarrasing being as that is an LTS release... And who said i was judging "overall stability" - i cited a few components which behaved like junk. The fact is; While according to bogot all of these other distro's are alpha quality - i run a tonne of components built from GIT repositories and my (Arch) system is far more stable and reliable than Ubuntu (development release, LTS or any other ubu release)...

I believe that Ubuntu will switch to Systemd if it comes a time for Ubuntu where switching would really out-weighed the benefits of keeping Upstart. That's not currently the case.
Canonical is known to be pragmatical (that mostly why they generate so much hate on Phoronix and other niches, they just move forward without caring about what other may think). I don't see any reason for them to keep Upstart forever IF systemd becomes more interesting for them in the future.

Systemd is already much better than upstart and has been for quite a while... Canonical may not see that yet, but it's not a matter of whether Systemd's benefits outwiegh those of Upstart. - it's only a matter of whether Canonical/Ubuntu developers realize that. (or wait for debian to do the majority of work for them).

[bwat47]

Except Upstart has been thoroughly tested and systemd is only used in Fedora, openSUSE and Arch (all of them are alpha-quality distros).

Opensuse is not an 'alpha quality distro'. Its fairly conservative and has an 8 month release cycle. I'd say opensuse is more stable and less buggy then recent ubuntu releases, and more conservative than ubuntu in general.

Ubuntu (the only distro that uses upstart) is often pushing things before they are ready, is based on random snapshots from debian unstable, and is certainly not known for its lack of bugs and stability, so your comparison of "systemd is unstable because distros that use it are bleeding edge" doesn't hold much water. As someone that has used ubuntu for years, I consider it "beta quality" software at best. The non-LTS releases have always been glorified betas.

I don't have anything against upstart itself, its a decent init system, but systemd is superior. I can understand canonical not wanting to adopt it though because they already have their own decent init system.

Also many more distros use systemd then the ones on your list, although they are not "major" distros (with the exception of mageia/mandriva maybe). Off the top of my head: Mageia, ROSA Linux, Mandriva, Sabayon, Frugalware, Chakra, and some mobile platforms are also using it, tizen and mer (mer is the base for jolla's sailfish os).

And the upcoming RHEL 7 will be using it, and RHEL would not include it unless it was rock solid and ready. And from posts I've seen from some debian developers lately, debian also looks like it will be adopting systemd in the future (but it almost certainly won't happen in jessie, mabye jessie +1). Here's some talks from a debian dev about systemd: http://meetings-archive.debian.net/p...s_debunked.ogv, http://meetings-archive.debian.net/p...th_systemd.ogv.

And this post: http://people.debian.org/~stapelberg...-portable.html

Not embracing these features and staying with sysvinit indefinitely is not a viable option if Debian wants to remain relevant for today’s demands. In the short term, the migration to systemd will cause additional maintenance effort for individual package maintainers, but it will pay off in the long term.

So in conclusion systemd is pretty well tested and used in various distros today, even if some of the major distros that have adopted it are "bleeding edge". And we have several extremely "stable" distros (RHEL) which will have it in its next major version, and (debian) which is moving (slowly like debian always does ) to adopting it in the future.

[dee.]

It's a good reason. Canonical do not want to de-stabilise the system simply by changing the plumbing layer, sorry.

Oh, so that's why they put an untested, insecure, alpha-quality graphics server with an untested fork of a X compatibility layer in their next release. Makes sense.

[Malizor]

...and yet, SystemD is much better than Upstart, no contest.... Upstart is okay, even decent but nothing to "write home about"... For example: Last week, i decided to take a look at 13.10 daily build <i wanted to see Mir + see if ubuntu had anything interesting happening on their desktop these days>... After installing it to a partition, i quickly noticed Ubuntu takes 10-15 seconds longer to boot than my Archlinux installation. (yup, systemd is much faster to boot and much more tweakable). 2nd. I experienced graphical artifacts / juttter in Unity/Compiz and generally, it wasn't a pleasent experience. 3rd. Unity crashed on me, for no apparent reason. 4th. I played around with Mir - which didn't work very well and i experienced a segmentation fault within minutes ~ awesome QA going on at Canonical.

Funny how you consider all of these other distro's to be alpha; yet in less than 1 hour of using Ubuntu, i experienced a number of problems, that i don't experience at all, on my "alpha-grade" distribution... (and typically, Ubuntu has historically shipped half-baked / alpha-grade software in their distro).

You can't seriously judge the overall stability of Ubuntu (or any other distro) by testing a development release.
And, in this case, 13.10 is not even "feature-frozen", witch means that the bug-fixing sprint did not even start.

besides all of that, Ubuntu is already pulling in logind (systemd) and my guess is that in the future; the benefits they currently see by using upstart are going to be out-weighed by the benefits of using Systemd (which is a superior init system).

I believe that Ubuntu will switch to Systemd if it comes a time where switching would really out-weighed the benefits of keeping Upstart. That's not currently the case.
Canonical is known to be pragmatical (that mostly why they generate so much hate on Phoronix and other niches, they just move forward without caring about what other may think). I don't see any reason for them to keep Upstart forever IF systemd becomes more interesting for them in the future.

[ninez]

Except Upstart has been thoroughly tested and systemd is only used in Fedora, openSUSE and Arch (all of them are alpha-quality distros).

...and yet, SystemD is much better than Upstart, no contest.... Upstart is okay, even decent but nothing to "write home about"... For example: Last week, i decided to take a look at 13.10 daily build <i wanted to see Mir + see if ubuntu had anything interesting happening on their desktop these days>... After installing it to a partition, i quickly noticed Ubuntu takes 10-15 seconds longer to boot than my Archlinux installation. (yup, systemd is much faster to boot and much more tweakable). 2nd. I experienced graphical artifacts / juttter in Unity/Compiz and generally, it wasn't a pleasent experience. 3rd. Unity crashed on me, for no apparent reason. 4th. I played around with Mir - which didn't work very well and i experienced a segmentation fault within minutes ~ awesome QA going on at Canonical.

Funny how you consider all of these other distro's to be alpha; yet in less than 1 hour of using Ubuntu, i experienced a number of problems, that i don't experience at all, on my "alpha-grade" distribution... (and typically, Ubuntu has historically shipped half-baked / alpha-grade software in their distro).

It's a good reason. Canonical do not want to de-stabilise the system simply by changing the plumbing layer, sorry.

Out of curiousity; How long have you been using Ubuntu? ....I ask because throughtout Ubuntu's history they have shipped alpha-grade software as core components of their OS. - PulseAudio and Compiz are two OBVIOUS examples. -> I imagine we could also consider much of Canonical/Ubuntu's "downstream patchs" on XYZ toolkit/lib/etc could also be considered Alpha-grade, depending on the scope of their changes, since typically these are patches rejected or not even submitted upstream in the first place (that's not a vote of confidence)... Canonical is known for shipping half-baked buggy code onto their users. (and in the case of compiz - aside from some performance enhancements, Compiz is much easier to break now, than before Canonical took it under their wing... Hell, they didn't even remove options from CCSM that are 100% broken <even when they knew about them, FFS!>)... Obviously, Mir will be another example of largely untested, alpha grade software being used as a core peice of their distro...

besides all of that, Ubuntu is already pulling in logind (systemd) and my guess is that in the future; the benefits they currently see by using upstart are going to be out-weighed by the benefits of using Systemd (which is a superior init system). But likely, Canonical/Ubuntu wouldn't even consider doing that until Debian users (not Ubuntu users) have used / tested systemd quite a bit ~ since it is largely debian developers who do most of the hardwork that Ubuntu/Canonical benefits from. (what 80%+ pakcages come from debian).

[Teho]

Except Upstart has been thoroughly tested and systemd is only used in Fedora, openSUSE and Arch (all of them are alpha-quality distros).

openSUSE most definetly is not "alpha-quality" and systemd is used by many other distributions on top of those including Mandriva, Mageia, Chakra, NixOS, Sabayon... and it's going to be used on RHEL 7 (late 2013) and SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 (mid 2014). It's also used by Tizen and Sailfish on mobile. It's mandated by GENEVI Alliance for IVI systems and so on.

[ворот93]

Thouroughly tested is the reason you give when you don't have anything else to complain about. You should also mention that systemd has bugs and that its newer so people have to learn it and that bears shit in the woods. All these cheap reasons are just complains, unless you have a usecase which you tried and failed with systemd and the upstream didn't bother helping you.

It's a good reason. Canonical do not want to de-stabilise the system simply by changing the plumbing layer, sorry.

And since you don't use Ubuntu - wtf are you complaining about?

[mark45]

Except Upstart has been thoroughly tested and systemd is only used in Fedora, openSUSE and Arch (all of them are alpha-quality distros).

Thouroughly tested is the reason you give when you don't have anything else to complain about. You should also mention that systemd has bugs and that its newer so people have to learn it and that bears shit in the woods. All these cheap reasons are just complains, unless you have a usecase which you tried and failed with systemd and the upstream didn't bother helping you.

[ворот93]

Fewer features than systemd
Smaller community than systemd
Non-free Contributor agreement forcing contributors to relicense to non-free.

What is there not to hate?

Except Upstart has been thoroughly tested and systemd is only used in Fedora, openSUSE and Arch (all of them are alpha-quality distros).

[Akka]

If Debian intends to move to systemd they would have gotten something more up to date in their Sid repositories instead of systemd v44.

Slow switch != keep an ancient version in the unstable and testing repos. Especially not for an init daemon that is already at v2xx.

They have systemd 204 in experimental at least
and upstart 1.6.1 in unstable