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79% Positive

Analyzed from 1437 words in the discussion.

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#systemd#more#system#don#world#victory#something#fine#should#building

Discussion (45 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

mxuribe•about 3 hours ago
This should be renamed to "Branding about..."...Because that seems to be the focus on this destination webpage...and not content specific to the underlying tech of systemd.
kyleee•about 2 hours ago
Yes a more accurate headline - systemd would like to be perceived as a suite of basic building blocks
tosti•about 2 hours ago
I can recommend the book "Savaged by Systemd"

It's on AA

blipvert•about 1 hour ago
> It’s on AA

Administrators Anonymous?

Is that where the alt.sysadmin.recovery crowd go now?

tosti•27 minutes ago
cyberpunk•about 1 hour ago
I keep meaning to leave a copy of this around the office somewhere however i suspect it would trigger HR
badatnames•about 2 hours ago
Where "basic" follows a highly nuanced alternate definition, where if you step out of line without realising it, you lose 3 days debugging a complex undocumented interaction between 4 enterprise crapware daemons only to find out the answer is "you're wrong and won't fix" buried in a 6 year old bug report, when all you did was plug in a USB mouse or try to set the default audio output device, or something else.

Total and utter propaganda, it's underdeveloped steaming garbage

ux266478•about 2 hours ago
I think the problem is that it's overdeveloped rather than underdeveloped.
9dev•about 2 hours ago
The reason for seeing overcomplexity in systemd components is usually that you never considered the use cases of other people or proper server management - mostly because in the days of olde, everyone cobbled together their shell script Jenga towers in seclusion.
kqgnkqgn•about 2 hours ago
If they don't have the problems that other people are having...maybe they don't need that complexity. Different use cases can use different solutions.

An Army unit crossing rocky and muddy terrain might want tracked vehicles and tanks. I don't need that in a vehicle I drive 10 minutes to the office in the city.

ux266478•about 1 hour ago
Actually I didn't say anything about overcomplexity and I wasn't thinking about systemd as an init system at all. That wild misinterpretation, which you knew to (partially) hedge with that "usually", is more or less the proof in the pudding frankly.
badatnames•about 2 hours ago
You know it's underdeveloped because everything is described as "basic" or "simple". There's no such thing in any complex design, yet somehow for all his purported seniority, he keeps pumping out designs using the same description.
0xbadcafebee•about 2 hours ago
"Building blocks" makes it sound like things you can use to build other things. In reality it's more of an octopus, or a fungus.
9dev•about 2 hours ago
But that’s precisely what it allows you to do: plug a socket unit into a service unit, connect a timer unit, then another service as a dependency… and that’s just for the init management. Systemd might not fit your personal stylistic preferences, but most of all it’s consistent.
Joker_vD•about 1 hour ago
Yeah, like what Upstart did! Why did we switch away from that, again?
c-hendricks•25 minutes ago
Didn't have timers for one, or the same level of support around sockets.
seany•about 2 hours ago
We had reasonable building blocks before systemd...
rezonant•about 2 hours ago
I think we just have different ideas of what the word "reasonable" means.
egorfine•about 1 hour ago
I don't think anyone seriously defends sysvinit.

However upstart was totally reasonable.

Joker_vD•about 1 hour ago
Upstart was reasonable. So is OpenRC.
IshKebab•about 2 hours ago
A bunch of barely working duck-taped Bash scripts? Hardly reasonable.
kjs3•about 1 hour ago
You might have done barely working duck-taped Bash scripts; not eveyone who calls themself a 'system admin' is competent. But actual professionals who ran these systems since the 1970s had carefully written, fully functional scripts and we were quite capable of keeping hundreds and thousands of servers running just fine. Being bad at your job isn't the tools fault.
IshKebab•25 minutes ago
All Bash scripts are duck-taped by definition. It's a shitty duck-tape language.

> thousands of servers running just fine

Err yeah well you might have noticed these things called "laptops" and "desktops". SysVinit was... fine.. on servers. It worked badly on desktops and not really at all on laptops. I'm pretty sure the post introducing SystemD explained it all in detail if you want to learn something.

hnlmorg•about 2 hours ago
You’d be surprised just how often systemd calls bash scripts.
jauntywundrkind•about 3 hours ago
This is just the homepage. Bah. I was hopeful this might be more! I would genuinely love for some posting on systemd that can actually talk to this.

There's posts on using systemd for this or that, which are fine, but it feels like the pro-systemd camp doesn't find or make opportunities to rally, to express ths vision, where-as the anti-vision (as ever) sells itself, is a magnet that makes common party out of all dissent.

nomel•about 2 hours ago
> pro-systemd camp doesn't find or make opportunities to rally

I'm not aware of this sort of parading in open source software. Do you have a past example? I see it as competent people using things that they want to use, with the "better" being preferred, for whatever reasons (including momentum). "Advocating" for an init system seems like something that should be entirely and completely by merit, with maintainability, debugability, and fragility probably being the top metrics for most systems, speed being important for anything with a human sitting in front of it.

jauntywundrkind•about 2 hours ago
Having everyone have to discover the pro/con's of every system themselves, in the dark, with no social media / blogging around it, seems like a very strange position to me.

Technology should be highly social. Especially open source! It in unique-for-technology ways gives us something real to be social over. We can share and unfold and unpack.

This isn't entirely what you are talking about but Architectures of Open Source is still one of the best "what is this" explorations of the tech world out there. I think good advocacy has a lot of these elements (if not so total) in it. In ways that can show the bigger pictures, which AOSA at it's best does! https://aosabook.org/en/

akerl_•about 2 hours ago
Given that the overwhelming majority of Linux distros have moved to systemd, it's not clear why the pro-systemd camp would need to be finding or making opportunities to rally.

They're spending their time build and improving systemd's set of building blocks.

jauntywundrkind•about 1 hour ago
The drift, the gap between the advanced guard of seasoned enjoyers and the rest of the world that doesn't know what their missing feels like material that deserves coverage to me?

Just stay heads down and keep doing the world, don't share, dont socialize has been the plan so far in a lot of open source. And I think the outcomes would be better if we tried methodologies other than this. Freaking weird that this is just accepted.

egorfine•about 1 hour ago
> the pro-systemd camp doesn't find or make opportunities to rally

Why would they? Their leader was always "I know better than you, now f off". This kind of approach doesn't need any rallying or evangelism at all.

wmf•about 2 hours ago
Every now and then there's a blog post or presentation that combines several systemd features to show how the result is a better overall system. The All Systems Go conference https://all-systems-go.io/ is a good place to learn about systemd.
Bluestein•about 2 hours ago
- https://systemd.io/ is full of documentation.-
cyberax•about 2 hours ago
And it's crap. It still lists blog posts from 2012.

There is NO good overall diagram of all the moving pieces in systemd.

mxuribe•about 3 hours ago
@jauntywundrkind I was about reply...but then @McGlockenshire said it best! Cut off the subdomain, and you'll get more info. ;-)
ares623•about 2 hours ago
Do they need to? As an outsider, my view is that they already "won".
jauntywundrkind•about 1 hour ago
Is your Civilization victory a Science, Military or Cultural one? I think that depends on how and if the technology is socialized and spoken of.

If people feel like it's an oppressor, something they don't understand that has rolled in, and now defacto is (is shipped in every distribution of note): it feels like a Military victory. Over them. It sparks no joy.

Appealing to the nerds can be a strong science victory. Preach all your amazingness. I personally can go on and on and on about how awesome it is that systemd offers workload isolation, least privileges, cgroups for juggling priorities. I love that mdns kind of just works for me, and integrates well with my resolver. There's little science-y reasons.

But there lurk Two Cultures problems everywhere. And figuring out how to bridge the technical to the world, how to sing praises, how to get the world to be interested in relating to, engaging in, giving it the ability to share in some of your wonder and awe: that is what turns Science Victory into a Cultural Victory. And it's what good worthy interesting projects deserve. And it should be an act we do, and help build. We should make appeals to the world, try to get them interested in relating to the upsides, and the downsides to, to give them something worth engaging. I feel like the negative creeps have absolutely slammed their way to Two Cultures wins, to appealing to the world with negativity, and I think some more deliberate, caring, thoughtful work and blogging would make a huge difference in building cultural momentum, in sealing in what ought be a Cultural Victory. That those who know systemd reasonably well largley agree with already, but that many people do not see or understand.

(Am I missing other victory types?)

McGlockenshire•about 3 hours ago
Yeah this is just a link to the branding page. I do appreciate the discussion of "system 500" at the bottom.

But if you yank out the "brand" from the URL you'll get the actual site.

jauntywundrkind•about 2 hours ago
Sure. These sites are fine rallying points, absolutely.

But they are also very old, and there's very few efforts I've seen to pitch and promote systemd. It's found and enjoyed by a lot of people (particularly those who had to deal with the tangled haphazard sprawl of cobbled together systems from the before times), it makes nicely visible what is happening on the system, integrates cgroups and good least capabilities practices.

But it feels to me like there ought be more ongoing and vocal celebration of this, enjoyment of this. More rallying points that trumpet the wins, that page people in to how nicely this helps. I want to see more positive tech advocacy, is what I'm saying. This is a fine site, yes, with lots of discussion. I've enjoyed decades of Lennart blog posts too. But I wish there was more. I wish this submission was a blog post of the same title. A fresh take, a fresh spin, on such a worthy-of-treatment topic.

graemep•about 3 hours ago
The vision is controversial so a lot of advocates find it easier to promote as an init system.

It tends to be the anti-systemd people who keep saying its not just an init system.

cyberax•about 1 hour ago
Yeah, and these LEGO blocks are strewn around the room by a 3-year-old just waiting for you to step on them. It's the worst thing, there is no organization in systemd. No rhyme or reason to it.

The basic core service supervision in systemd is great. And nearly everything else around it is bad as a result: command-line utilities, filesystem mount handling, virtualization integration, network configuration, etc.

Just look at systemctl's `--help` if you don't believe me. Why does it have `service-log-level` to set the log level for the target, but not a way to actually _view_ the logs? Or why does it have a top-level `--firmware-setup` flag?