Linux: concerns over systemd [OT]

Wed Oct 22 11:21:04 UTC 2014

On Wed, Oct 22, 2014 at 12:00:52PM +0100, Daniel Ankers wrote:
> On 22 October 2014 11:34, <nanog at jack.fr.eu.org> wrote:
> > Before leaving Debian, things to think:
> > - will systemd be officialy the only system available ?
> > - if so, won't we get a way to bypass that ?
> 
> And one other thought... is it really that bad?
> 
> Personally I like it a lot better than sysV plus inittab plus daemontools.

When it was init+daemontools, I could hold my nose over the binary logging
and consider using it.  Now it's taking over cron and all manner of other
things, there's no way in hell I'm letting it onto my systems.

As to the issue of "will it only be systemd", the problem is that as the
officially-blessed option, that's the one that'll get the universal support,
so if you want to run something else, some things will mysteriously not
work, and package maintainers won't care nearly as much.

Bypassing systemd is a whole hell of a lot harder than switching out
sysvinit for something else, because systemd does so many things, and many
other things are being modified to absolutely depend on things that only
systemd provides -- GNOME's the big one, but docker is closely tied to
systemd too, I believe, I think udev needs systemd now (or has it been
incorporated into systemd?  I can't keep all this straight) and I'm pretty
sure I've heard of other things deprecating non-systemd ways of doing
things.

The *really* damaging part of it, though, is that as systemd grows
to overshadow the things it re-implements (udev, dbus, etc) it starves the
alternatives of light and they quickly fall behind and are no longer viable
as ways to avoid systemd.  That isn't systemd's fault, per se, but it does
make it much harder over time to avoid getting caught in the gaping maw.

- Matt