Latest Round Of Debian Systemd vs. Upstart Voting Ends

[mrugiero]

we can stop this silly discussion of portability, because even sysvinit is linux-specific and not portable
http://teythoon.cryptobitch.de/posts...-init-systems/

All of it is just more support to my point. Not only Upstart shouldn't be claiming portability while it currently doesn't work (aside from an experimental port to BSD) outside of Linux, nor should be considered a big issue against systemd if there isn't any option that is actually portable (well, I'm just assuming OpenRC also uses /proc too, but correct me if I'm wrong).

I was referring to the language, not the actual point.

I'm aware, but my point was that that point was actually out of context, as part of the context was how they didn't talk about technical matters. That point in particular was *sort of* valid.

But if we're on the subject, neither Upstart nor systemd were ported to other kernels. It's just that Upstart might, possibly, technically be portable since it doesn't rely on cgroups.

I'll just assume you forgot I said so in my post, but it's OK, I'll remind you, I'm aware, and most of my post talked about how it's dishonest to claim portability just because *it can be done*, while having nothing there. I mean, yeah, it's probably easier to port because they don't rely on cgroups, but that doesn't change the fact they are using that as a means to say "look, you can use this in all of your flavors", while such assertion is a lie. It works only on Linux, currently.

More importantly, it doesn't matter since both are released under GPL\LGPL so the BSD camp will never embrace them and instead would rather write their own thing like they did with the rest of their user-land.

But the point on working on BSD is not for FreeBSD to adopt it, but for the Debian/kFreeBSD flavor to adopt it. Debian has no problem with GPL software. Remember it's all in the context of Debian's needs, as it's Debian's voting.

I know, I think the official spelling is bad English so I don't use it. In English proper nouns are capitalized (meaning the first letter is a capital and the rest lowercase) and words and letters aren't jammed together awkwardly. I also don't think acronyms/initialisms should have all letters capital unless people actually say the separate letters. So I write "System D" and "Gnu" and and "I-Mac" and so on. I also refuse to say "OS X". That one's "Mac OS".

If you are going to argue about "proper English", then you should respect the conventional rules of it, and that means initialisms go all capital. GNU is all capital, in accord with the conventional rules of English. Now, if you are going to use your own rules, just say it just looks awkward to you, I have nothing against it. I'm pretty much in favor of writing any way you want, as long as it makes sense in terms of etymology and the meaning is clear.

[stevenc]

we can stop this silly discussion of portability, because even sysvinit is linux-specific and not portable
http://teythoon.cryptobitch.de/posts...-init-systems/

The /proc filesystem is a standard feature of glibc-based systems: GNU/Linux, kFreeBSD and Hurd, therefore I'd describe it as portable to all of Debian's ports, hence why sysvinit was portable. OpenRC was so easily ported because it also makes use of it.

[erendorn]

init has not been patched in... 5 years i think
(patch was minor)

Probably because people have given up improving it? If there is one thing that all TC members and just about everyone seems to agree, it's that sysv init is not sufficient anymore, and cannot even be patched to get to the required functionality level.

[newwen]

The better solution from a technical point of view tends to win over the over it's politically more convenient counterpart.

Upstart backers' position is obviously political, as Upstart maintainers and their relationship with Canonical.
BTW, there's nothing wrong not doing things the Unix way... Those saying so should be writing complex scripts using only generic tools like grep, cut, etc. That's one of their few flawed arguments to justify their political position.

Systemd is the technically superior choice and there's no risk of vendor lock-in with it. Cost of losses due to duplicate efforts (as it is with Mir) would be far higher that imaginary risk.

BTW, I'm an Ubuntu user, and have nothing against Canonical, but I don't like decisions which have more to do with NIH or political stances than with technical merits. Upstart was once a leap forward, but it's been now surpassed. The Mir absurdity is another story, but is related to this story and has got lots of people induced to dislike Canonical as a whole.

[c117152]

I've seen this repeated a lot here. xnox from Canonical/Ubuntu already began porting Upstart to Debian GNU/kFreeBSD for us, it can build, it runs, though it doesn't know yet how to initialise everything for a normal boot. And it's going to lack some functionality though initially. It is viable though in the jessie timeframe.

I'm aware of the port attempts. They're still in the "might, possibly, technically be portable" state: Might happen in jessy timeframe; Possibly be merged into the upstream in a couple of month; Technically be portable as we can demonstrate in this demo... I personally think they will happen but I can't tell the future.

OpenRC is a whole other matter. I would have loved to have it in Debian a year or two ago since I've been using it in my Gentoo servers for ages quite happily. If you dig back my posts you'd actually find me saying the very same thing. Now, it's simply too late. I still prefer it to Upstart for the non-linux Debians. It's already being used in FreeBSD so there's no questions about its viability. But I'm not a BSD user any-more so my preference is hardly relevant and really shouldn't matter.

Note I'm really not too keen on this whole portability business. It reeks of the awful Java stench and is generally a sign of the least common denominator. But since I'm on the so called pro-systemd camp I can't really brush it off on accounts of my dismissal of cross-platform compatibility as a whole since it will give the appearance of me disregarding a valid criticism of systemd with a weak excuse. However, if it were to become the main point of discussion, then I'd much rather have OpenRC to Upstart for reasons already mentioned.

[newwen]

As interested has said, this the beginning of a war against the future of Linux: systemd, kdbus, cgroups and wayland.

Debian should adopt Systemd as default init, and fallback to sysvinit. As far as I know, Upstart can use sysvinit scripts, so this would be the way of supporting other init systems.

[Chaz]

If you are going to argue about "proper English", then you should respect the conventional rules of it, and that means initialisms go all capital. GNU is all capital, in accord with the conventional rules of English. Now, if you are going to use your own rules, just say it just looks awkward to you, I have nothing against it. I'm pretty much in favor of writing any way you want, as long as it makes sense in terms of etymology and the meaning is clear.

Never said "proper English". I'm not focused so much on what other people consider proper as what I personally consider good or bad. I really think how a word is spelled and how it is pronounced should match (with an enormous set of exceptions for longstanding English words).

In the case of GNU, and other abbreviated names deliberately made up to create an acronym, I don't actually consider that to be a legitimate initialism. If they had a thing called Gnu is Not Unix (is Not Unix is Not Unix . . .) and just abbreviated it for convenience (and said "gee en yoo") then that would be a legitimate initialism. But in fact they say "guhnoo" (should be "noo", that's a debate for another day) and all-caps it just because they think it's cool. It is kind of cool, with the recursive acronym thing, but I have seen so many incredibly dumb acronyms over the years that I have decided to just reject them all. Far more than GNU, I really hate "S.H.I.E.L.D." and above all the "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act". A bunch of congressmen were so excited that they got the words to spell out "patriot", when they could have just formally named the thing "Patriot Act". And everyone goes around calling it the "Patriot Act", so for all intents and purposes that is it's real (informal) name, but for some reason we're supposed to write it in asscaps? Why on earth would I want to do that?

A good precedent was set when Nintendo insisted that the "correct" spelling of their new console was "Nintendo GAMECUBE". IGN just said, no, we're not doing that, and started writing "Gamecube".

But that's just me. Feel free to spell stuff however you want. Just don't let any marketing flacks tell you you have to follow whatever spelling makes them the most money.

[old486whizz]

http://linuxcounter.net/distributions/stats.html
the reason to switch to anything has to have nothing to do with what everyone else is doing
they are planing their own future

Utter nonsense!

Debian is making this change and one of the arguments for the change is developers and the ease it will have on them, as well as future packages and ease of integrating newer packages back into Debian.
It's like saying "let's have Debian use Mir as default because it performs better than X" and the main pro argument being "Debian shouldn't care what the rest of the Linux community is doing".

At the moment, things seem to be moving more towards systemd integration across the board.
logind and networkd are the first of many (gnome, possibly KDE, etc) going forward which will have parts crippled or require major work by Debian to maintain and perhaps even lock at specific versions due to that fact.

I think "popular" should actually be the number of independent distro's (root distros / parent distros / whatever) picking the system. The popularity of each distro doesn't really count.

(also, most servers on teh internets run either debian or ubuntu)

Perhaps Debian - I can understand it to some degree, from what I've seen the upgrade paths have always been sort of clean.

But ubuttnu is a recent (and alarming) trend of 'OMG me yoozes teh compootah @ homz wiv thees, so mi MUHST bee guud @ duuing surver admin!' (basically: I know what I'm doing because I've used this software for all of 5 minutes and can cut+paste from a website instead of actually knowing what is happening) being offered by cheap VPS hosts.

Let's not forget, Upstart was skipped because of a slightly poorer origin design, and is actually thinking of picking up many features already offered by systemd... Which is ironic seeing as how one of the arguments against systemd is "it's monolithic and absorbing too many things".

Unfortunately I cannot talk much about upstart, the little experience I've had with it in Redhat/Fedora doesn't fill me with confidence and the little documentation I have read doesn't swap my in that.
Systemd however I have followed from the start, seeing how it's using more features from the Linux kernel (cgroups as well as socket activation). The fact it makes logical and technical sense to use the features at your disposal, and it works to be much more smoother and tidier (hmmm, the grammar there doesn't feel right.. More smooth and more tidy?).

As for systemd, I don't think any developers even have an interest in porting systemd to non-Linux. Upstream doesn't, and made it clear wouldn't accept patches for portability. Its design doesn't agree with traditional UNIX-like simplicity at all. And clearly they like to rewrite things all the time so it's a moving target. Even keeping up with its interfaces and unit file syntax would be a chore.

What utter FUD. Their design goals are integration with features offered by the Linux kernel, not by other kernels. To be more event-driven, you want (and need?) to be tied to the kernel closely, and so having different init daemon's for different kernels makes perfect technical sense.
I cannot find a single instance of unit file syntax breakage, and believe the syntax hasn't changed, and will always be "property = value" ... Upstart on the other hand is already proven that the config file is not a standard syntax.
If you mean systemd is continually improving at a fast rate, then sure - the application maintainers could replace the unit file if/when they are aware of any better features... Just like every other development stack/API/language out there.

Also the argument of "unix-like simplicity" .
The idea of Unix being "a tool which does a task and does it well" - doesn't necessarily need to be just one task - awk and sed can do amazing things. NetworkManager is a combination of network stuff (bridging, wireless, VPNs, etc). The 'ip' command giving you routing as well as interface settings etc.
When you move to an event-based daemon, which administrates event's on a system, you need to think (which trust me, people don't do enough of - although systemd looks to have been planned for a year or two) and then see what those events encompass. They encompass plugging in hardware (udev), changing networks(networkd), network traffic, users logging in(logind), etc.
Saying systemd (a modular project now) is not unix-like is like saying the Linux kernel is not unix-like, since it is incorporating all the hardware drivers, it's implementing firewalls and software security, it's including a random number generator, it'll soon have kdbus, it implements non-POSIX features.

[mrugiero]

Never said "proper English". I'm not focused so much on what other people consider proper as what I personally consider good or bad. I really think how a word is spelled and how it is pronounced should match (with an enormous set of exceptions for longstanding English words).

Then, we agree. I mistakenly thought you mentioned "proper English" because when you talked about proper nouns the word "proper" kept floating on my head and got out of context. I do use some terms out of what they conventionally means, or use different words for concepts I feel the terms that are commonly used don't really fit, too. As I said, for me it's OK as long as it makes sense, and I'm even against some conventions (particularly not English ones as I don't know the language in that amount of depth, but in my mother tongue, Spanish, there are some conventions that just feel stupid).

[gens]

Probably because people have given up improving it? If there is one thing that all TC members and just about everyone seems to agree, it's that sysv init is not sufficient anymore, and cannot even be patched to get to the required functionality level.

init program itself is fine
thing it does is it reads a file and starts whatever is written there based on the designated runlevel
and re parents orphans on itself

problem with sysvinit is, from what i understand, that you need to work to get the info and control on started things
and that people tend to write complicated shell scripts, but that is another topic

Lennart wants systemd as pid 1, from what i understand, to get that info
but i argument the kernel can give you that info, and if you are run as root you can do anything based on that info