Systemd 246 Is On The Way With Many Changes

[starshipeleven]

I should have made myself more clear about what I meant by the Unix way. The idea of one tool to do one task, and do it well. Systemd definitely does not focus on one small task.

Systemd is the project name. It has literally many dozens of standalone daemons and tools that are modular and work more or less independently (or use standard interfaces so anyone can make a replacement, see elogind for example)

You are saying GNU Coretools/Coreutils (sed/awk and other basic command line tools) isn't following the Unix Way because it's not focusing on one small task.

Come to think of it though, that is why systemd-networkd is such a joy to use.

fyi, this is a standalone daemon focused on a specific task, using documented and stable interfaces. This is the Unix Way.

[jacob]

I should have made myself more clear about what I meant by the Unix way. The idea of one tool to do one task, and do it well. Systemd definitely does not focus on one small task.

Come to think of it though, that is why systemd-networkd is such a joy to use. No need to use `ip`, `wireguard`, `dhclient`, etc to set up a network. Make a netdev and a network file and you are done.

This catechism desperately needs to die. Let's ignore for now the fact that I can't think of a single Unix tool that does anything at all "well". The idea of doing"one thing" (however crappily) makes theoretically sense for trivial shell commands and exclusively for those. In the real world it's inherently BS for two reasons. On one hand, Unix makes this approach MUCH more difficult to use than any other OS I know of. It could be possible to develop sensible software that way on Multics, VMS or Windows, or Linux if using yhr kernel's non-POSIX features, but emphatically not on Unix. On the other hand, users want definitive solutions to their problems, not puzzle pieces that do an arbitrarily defined "one thing" and must be patched up together using DYI ductape scripts. Combine these two issues together and you end up with abominations like Postfix. Ever wondered why SMTP servers are dead and everyone uses Exchange or Office 365?

[timrichardson]

I wish this particular piece of FUD would die one of these days. A sysvinit based slackware setup with all its scripts is exponentially more stable than any of the current top 5 most popular systemd distros.

You said you didn't care about systemd. I am not convinced.

[andyprough]

You said you didn't care about systemd. I am not convinced.

I have both systemd and sysvinit installed on my system. If I cared I would use a distro with no systemd. At boot time I am offered the choice in the grub menu of using systemd or sysvinit. I have never once chosen to use systemd, as sysvinit exceeds my expectations, and I wish to avoid certain system stability problems common when running systemd.

[rtfazeberdee]

i have both systemd and sysvinit installed on my system. If i cared i would use a distro with no systemd. At boot time i am offered the choice in the grub menu of using systemd or sysvinit. I have never once chosen to use systemd, as sysvinit exceeds my expectations, and i wish to avoid certain system stability problems common when running systemd.

roflmao

[andyprough]

roflmao

You've never seen the boot screen for MX? https://trisquel.info/files/Screenshot-4_0.png
Really works, exactly as I described. Very stable, and fast.

[k1e0x]

But it's precisely the "anti-UNIX way" philosophy that allows it to make things robust, simple and just work.

The reason people say that is because the philosophy is for a program to be small, do one thing and do it well. Systemd does not fit that description unless by do one thing you mean run your entire system. It's also not an init system. OpenRC is feature rich, it also is "just and init" and it does one thing and does it well. It is as big of difference between vi and Microsoft Office.

Systemd is anything but simple too.. It is probably the most complicated thing in Linux. if you want honest to god simple try real Unix like FreeBSD. After install it boots up and runs about 10 PID's and you can easily know what each one is. You can know exactly what your system is doing just by looking at top. There is a lot of value in having a very very simple system.

For example: perhaps you need a NTP server. The box's entire purpose in life is to run ntp and nothing else. systemd seems overly complex for this as it manages the time itself, where as with FreeBSD you can slim that system down to maybe 64~128M of ram and that is all it does, it will take less than an hour to setup and it will run OpenNTPD till the hardware fails in ~20 years.

[Zan Lynx]

if you want honest to god simple try real Unix like FreeBSD. After install it boots up and runs about 10 PID's and you can easily know what each one is. You can know exactly what your system is doing just by looking at top. There is a lot of value in having a very very simple system.

The real test with FreeBSD is the add-ons. No two BSD admins will do things the same way. Every single one thinks that he, and only he, knows the One True Way. You will find the configuration and start scripts in a slightly different place on every single BSD installation.

[k1e0x]

The real test with FreeBSD is the add-ons. No two BSD admins will do things the same way. Every single one thinks that he, and only he, knows the One True Way. You will find the configuration and start scripts in a slightly different place on every single BSD installation.

Load the iso and press enter till it's installed and edit one line in rc.conf. Super hard.

[Zan Lynx]

Load the iso and press enter till it's installed and edit one line in rc.conf. Super hard.

Yes, because PostgreSQL and Nginx are preconfigured in there.

Hint: They're not.

And many admins I've run into are too good for using "ports", they build from source using their own settings. You might find stuff in /opt or /usr/local and you might find configuration in /etc or /etc/nginx or /opt/nginx or maybe the admin wishes he was using Docker and put everything in its own directory like /opt/AuthService, and then /opt/AuthService/nginx, /opt/AuthService/postgres, etc.