Discussion of systemd adoption by Debian, openrc, sysvinit

Edit:
The following posts moved from another hjacked thread here, in the interest of having a place to continue the discussion if there are developments.
-thunderrd

Even the Linux OS devs can't get it together. Lots of lolz here:

http://debianfork.org/

But a more realistic view of the systemd thing here:

http://news.siduction.org/

Exactly, If it "killed" Linux, then it must have been WAY better than what I'm using now.

Their main reason for forking is utter horseshit. I really wonder if it is going to gain real traction.

I use Gentoo, Debian stable, and an unstable Debian derivative regularly, and all of them have a way to remain systemd-free if the user so desires.

Their main arguments are that Debian (and some other distros) has elected (through proper, extensive study and a vote of the devs) to make systemd the default init system. And that it is being 'forced' onto users. And it does too much. And that as an init system it 'doesn't know what it wants to be'. And ...

No one is 'forcing' something on a user simply because it's been made the default. My main machine runs Gentoo. The Gentoo devs have NOT adopted systemd as the default. But many Gentoo users ARE using it. I could, too, if I WANTED to. Is Gentoo 'forcing ' me to use sysvinit? Absolutely not. systemd is supported in Gentoo, just like the default init system, so I have a choice.

Debian, Ubuntu and some others are adopters of systemd. I am not being 'forced' to use it. The unstable Sid machine at my house runs systemd; not because I prefer it (actually, I don't) but because I chose to install it so I can learn it, because it might come in handy to know how it works someday.

Sid rolls, so who cares, anyway? Do what you want.

If you're a first-time installer, installing from the .iso, you are given a choice in the install routine. Use this, or use that: if you make no choice, it installs systemd. It's as simple as that. If you're a novice, you won't know what to choose, so you'll get systemd.

Incidentally, the reason I don't particularly like it is that it DOES do way more than one thing, it's involved in the power management and other stuff, and in some ways doesn't follow the modular Linux philosophy of doing one thing well. Will it become a sore point over time? Maybe. Don't install it if that is your feeling. In my way of thinking, it has far too many other things depending on it, and I think that will make it a 'dependency hog' in the long run, requiring more and more packages to rely on its presence, and making it more and more difficult to remove.

At the end of the day, though, I'll tell you the real, deep meaning of all this mess. In the dev world, it is a resistance to Poettering and Co, and their past record. Just like what happened in the kernel team with Ingo Molnar and Con Kolivas a few years back, there are some folks who simply can't work together.

There are devs 'in the know' who are accusing Poettering of designing systemd with the sole aim of getting as many other packages as possible to depend on it. Ostensibly, this would be to strengthen the need for wider systemd usage.

I don't *really* think that it's coded with that in mind, but I do feel that it might become so. And so do many others who have forgotten much, much more than I've ever known

I restored Allen's post

If there is a concern about New Linux users installing a process without knowing what it "really" is, I think this is important.
I've read a bit about this conflict and even both of your posts here and still don't fully understand init and systemd
So even as a power user, I would just use the defaults because I wouldn't understand either of them anyways.

You are right that we aren't "forced" to use either one, but 99% of the time beginners and power users just run what comes out-of-the-box. Cause we ain't programmers.

My concern is about Ubuntu, Mint and other distro's that are based on Debian. How will this affect them in the long run?
Will there be a forked Ubuntu and Mint in response to this conflict?

That is still "programmer language" to me
It really seems like a developer controversy and since its an open community, people can fork if they want to.
Instead of fighting, just fork it... I guess

Hell, we all have a hard enough time getting along with laws, rules, money, religion, politics
It sucks we have to fight in the digital world as well.

I actually love Pulseaudio! It provides some amazing features that Alsa doesn't support.
The main problems I have is Wine not supporting Pulseaudio... probably for the same reason and this Debian controversy.

Err...can you tell me how you restored that post <sigh>
I could not find the secret sauce.

Interestingly enough, I was hanging out at #gentoo-chat for a while this evening and followed closely this conversation, which, for once, I was NOT a part of:

I checked the number of binaries installed by systemd. It's 69. Now, I don't know about you all, but having a such huge rewrite of this much of the base system, with 69 binaries all reporting to the same guy, (and coded with glibc in mind, BTW, also belonging to the same guy, which has been highly controversial over the last several years) boggles the mind as to how it will be adequately maintained. It is an absolute MONSTER.

It went on after this, but the main ideas on both sides are fairly expressed here by some knowledgeable folks.

Incidentally, it's basically my fault, reading back, but we are wildly off-topic here; would it be a good for me to open a new thread and move this stuff into it? There might be more people wanting to weigh in on the topic, and this discussion might heat up even more in the near future.

I've contributed some small patches for SELinux to OpenRC. The code is mostly clean and relatively easy to understand, and OpenRC accomplishes pretty much the same goals as systemd without making 3/4s of the universe dependent on it.

IMO, systemd is a good idea, badly implemented. Why RedHat have chosen to go with it baffles me.

And this just about sums it all up:

Or this:

An amusing, and interesting flame war of sorts on the Freedesktop bugtracker, involving none other than Lennart Poettering responding to a bug entitled 'Systemd is Malware'

What do you think?

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=88570