Linux: concerns over systemd adoption and Debian's decision to switch

Wed Oct 22 21:43:36 UTC 2014

On Wed, Oct 22, 2014 at 11:30:57AM -0500, Jeffrey Ollie wrote:
> The people that like systemd (like myself) have wisely learned that
> the people that hate systemd, hate it mostly because it's different
> from what came before and don't want to change.

That's an entirely unfair characterization.

Some of us, including a lot of people on this list, have been pushing the
envelope on change for decades.  We've run alpha software on beta hardware,
cobbled together networks with duct tape, and burned a lot of midnight oil
while making innumerable mistakes and learning from them.

Speaking for myself, after migrating through far too many Unix
and Linux distributions to count, starting with Research Unix v6,
my entire professional career has been *constant* change.  I suspect
that the same is true of everyone else who's been doing this for a while.
Anyone who doesn't embrace change as a way of life probably isn't on
this list; they're somewhere else, maintaining Cobol written during
the Nixon administration.

My problem with systemd is not that it's a change: it's just one more
out of tens of thousands and so, in that sense, it's really not a big deal.
My problem with it is that I think it's a bad change, one not in keeping
with the "software tools" philosophy that has served us ridiculously
well for a very long time and -- so far -- has not been shown itself
to be in need of replacement.

A Leatherman pocket multitool is highly useful: I've had one for years.
It's great.  Until you need two screwdrivers at the same time...at which
point it becomes obvious why serious mechanics/craftsmen carry around a
toolbox with dozens of tools and why glomming all of those into one
supertool would be A Very Bad Move.

Similarly, the monolithic (and ever-expanding) nature of systemd is a
strategic design error.  That's probably not obvious to people who
measure their experience in years instead of decades -- it wouldn't
have been obvious to me back in the day either.  But it's pretty clear
from here, and dismissing it as "hey you kids get off my lawn" geezer
whining is not going to advance the discussion.  It would be better,
I think, to pull out a copy of Kernighan and Plauger's book -- which
is rather brief, actually -- read it cover-to-cover, and then consider
carefully whether the myriad-and-steadily-increasing number of functions
being subsumed by systemd should actually be in one program.

If that doesn't suffice, then I suspect it will only require waiting
a little while until a demonstration of why monolithic integration
is a bad idea will be provided by someone who is at this moment
studying the large-and-growing attack surface presented by systemd.

I hope I'm wrong about that.  I'm probably not.

(By the way, this should not be read to express unabashed support
for *any* of the various init systems that have been present in SysV
or BSD or AIX or Debian or Dynix or Red Hat or HPUX or Mint or Ultrix
or Solaris or or or or.  They all have their issues, some of which
were or are sporadically annoying.)

---rsk