On 02/03/2014 05:11, Eric Newcomb wrote: > Technical issues aside, I went through the list of members of the > tech-ctte, found here: https://www.debian.org/intro/organization. I > searched each name on the list on Google, and I can't honestly find > any evidence that the committee is "stacked" with Redhat and/or > Canonical employees. I'd like to see some proof of these assertions > before I'd give any credence to claims of conspiracy.
I also disapprove of such claims. It's unfortunate that the CTTE split in the way that it did. But I followed the discussion on bug 727708 with considerable interest; it was a serious, open technical discussion. You need proper evidence, not just suspicions, to start chucking around such claims. > I am not even close to advanced enough to have much of an opinion on > the matter, but if anyone would like to explain to me why they feel > that System V is superior, I'd be interested to hear your arguments, > provided they're based in fact, technical information and practical > knowledge, and not in nostalgia, emotion or resistance to change. First off, I'm not a Debian Developer. The way Debian is constituted, it's ultimately up to DDs to decide what direction Debian takes (so I understand). So my remarks below should be read in the light of the fact I'm not a DD, just a user - I don't speak ith any authority. I don't believe that SysV is superior to *any* other init system. I think very few people are arguing that it's really superior to systemd. I think it's unfortunate that the CTTE didn't consider OpenRC at all. Systemd scares me. As far as I can see it does a lot of things right (in some cases these are things that no other contender does right); I'm not going to try to enumerate those things, that's been one elsewhere. But the way systemd has been designed, in particular the way it has borged dbus and syslog, is a real problem for me. I try to build systems that only run those daemons the system really needs. This is partly for security, and partly because I have several systems that are resource-challenged. Many of those systems have no GUI, and until now needed no dbus. I try to run nothing that depends on polkit or consolekit (it's a coincidence that those components are also Lennart's work). But the systemd approach is to use dbus for all IPC; and dbus is now part of systemd. Dbus is complicated; I don't begin to understand it. SystemD places dbus at the heart of PID1, and that IMO was a questionable technical decision. SystemD isn't just an init system; it also uses the CGROUPs kernel feature to manage user sessions. I don't understand why that functionality was incorporated into the init program. An init system, IMO, should restrict itself to bringing up services. I *really* don't want binary logs. I realise that I can make the new journald pass all log output to a text-based syslog daemon; but then I'm running a journald that I don't need. Similarly I have no need for a logind: even those of my systems that have a GUI are not multi-seat. If only systemd had been designed as a smorgasbord - a set of components designed to work in concert, but each being susceptible to being omitted in favour of its predecessor, then I would have been much less uncomfortable about it. I think it's great that Debian provides the only mainstream platform that supports The Hurd an kFreeBSD kernels, although I don't use them. The choice of systemd as a default init system will inevitably marginalise those kernels in Debian, which I think is sad. I do hope that those working on writing standalone components that implement the various systemd interfaces are successful (and soon). I will probably be sticking with Wheezy/SysV as long as possible, or until the prospects of those efforts becomes clear. I wish I had the chops to contribute to those projects - I believe they have the potential to match the strengths of systemd, while avoiding the birds-nest of dependencies that makes systemd seem such a heavy, take-it-or-leave-it deal. Of course, the CTTE's decision concerned the *default* init system for Jessie. Other init systems will continue to be packaged. So it's not an apocalypse. But systemd does *so much*, and so many other distros have decided to adopt it, that I fear that applications will come to rely on its features; the other init systems will be marginalised, and eventually wither. We will then all become dependent on Red Hat for a large part of our critical infrastructure. Red Hat is a billion-dollar commercial operation, with goals that are very different from Debian's. So I fear the CTTE's decision may in time come to harm the Debian project. Anyway, those are some of *my* reasons for viewing the CTTE's decision with apprehension. I hope you think they're based in fact, and not nostalgia or emotion. Incidentally, the arguments I've given arise from the way I generally use GNU/Linux. People who use GNU/Linux mainly as a desktop, on beefy hardware, will tend to have a greater appreciation of systemd's strengths, several of which benefit only desktop users. NOTE that the subject-line is incorrect; *eight* people decided the fate of Debian. -- Jack. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: https://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
