:: Re: [DNG] Systemd as tragedy
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Author: Joel Roth
Date:  
To: dng
Subject: Re: [DNG] Systemd as tragedy
Alessandro Selli wrote:
> On 31/01/19 at 03:38, Joel Roth via Dng wrote:
> > On Thu, Jan 31, 2019 at 12:19:44AM +0100, Alessandro Selli wrote:
> >> Might interest someone:
> >>
> >> https://lwn.net/Articles/777595/
> >>
> >> [Front] Posted Jan 28, 2019 20:05 UTC (Mon) by corbet
> >>
> >> His attempt to cast that story for the
> >> pleasure of his audience resulted in a sympathetic and nuanced look at a
> >> turbulent chapter in the history of the Linux system.
> > Hard to believe I listened to the same talk Corbet
> > is describing. What I heard was a propaganda piece,
> > finding reasons to sell the systemd approach
> > to BSD conference attendees.
>
>   Not really.  He points out there were good reasons to want a new init,
> that systemd was a try at innovating something that was old, and that
> this is a different matter compared to *how* that change was implemented.


Hi Alessandro,

Rice scrupulously avoids mentioning other innovations in the
field of init systems. He represents it as a binary decision
of old versus new.

>   Honestly, the anti-systemd front is never going to
> prevail pushing technology dating from the 70's or
> steering the debate into an ad hominem assault against
> Lennart Poettering.  It's only chance is developing
> something better, an init system and daemon
> management-and-monitoring tool that was simpler, more
> versatile, customizable and stable than systemd. 


Anti-systemd seems like a pejorative way to describe a
community, and front seems like a rather warlike metaphor.
I'd like to find another paradigm! Also, if it is a war, Red
Hat and friends always won based on the number of users'
machines running systemd. All those administrators will
certainly prefer to stay with what they have.

Funny that you bring up ad-hominum, as I didn't mention even
mention LP.

Also interesting that neither you nor Rice mention that security
considerations may be involved in using systemd.

> That is, the only chance against
> systemd is to come up with something technically better.  May I ask you
> to please present technical arguments either against systemd or in favor
> of alternatives rather than railing against LP or Benno Rice? 


The reason I hit on security is systemd is based on dBus,
and RPC frameworks have significant security weaknesses
compared to other solutions not relying on RPC. NFS is well
known for being vulnerable due to its dependence on RPC.
Windows has an enormous history of RPC related
vulnerabilities. I don't get how the tradeoff of this
design choice is just waved away.

There are so many other arguments against systemd that
have been discussed so endlessly leading to this
distribution and community that I don't think further
discussion on this list is relevant...

I agree with you that technical arguments will not get
business owners to change their init systems. That is why I
say that the war is mostly won by systemd. Not matter what
the issues, no one can be fired for choosing systemd/Red Hat/IBM.

Those who know and care, of course, can go elsewhere,
thanks in large part to the hardworking Devuan developers++

cheers,

--
Joel Roth