Re: complaints about systemd

On 10/09/2014 08:46 AM, Giacomo Mulas wrote:
> On Thu, 9 Oct 2014, Ray Andrews wrote:
>
>> From what I've read about the history and philosophy of all 'nix, I 
>> thought it was a bedrock rule that primary inputs and outputs *must* 
>> be text. Especially any sort of error log!  To abandon that is to 
>> travel down the road to Redmond, is it not?  Mr. Poettering seems to 
>> be a very clever lad, and it seems that some real deficiencies in the 
>> old init have been identified, and some real solutions offered, but 
>> it looks to me like systemd needs a sober re-think.  Sometimes we 
>> really can be too clever for our own good.
>
> I could not write it any better than this, I agree with every word. 
> Also, I
> have the same very annoying behaviour on several machines that shutdown
> hangs forever (or for a very long time), and in the end I frequently 
> end up
> pushing the power button. 
That is happening here, also.
Can *anything* justify a reduction in stability?
> This began to happen with systemd, and it is
> horribly difficult to debug: shutdown hangs after syslog was stopped, 
> so the
> only way to get some decent debug info is (would have been in SystemV 
> times)
> have the scripts dump a lot of info in text files, and then read them. 
> Now,
> with systemd, how do you go about debugging this?
Can *anything* justify creating a problem that can't be debugged?
>
> I second this: systemd has some good points, but the price tag is
> unreasonably high.  And, most importantly, there should be some real 
> choice,
> it should not be as deeply embedded as a dependency into many completely
> unrelated things: what does a desktop environment have to do with the 
> init
> system?  why on earth should gnome or any other desktop environment 
> depend
> on systemd and be somewhat broken, or even uninstallable, without it?
>
Again, bedrock principles:

"Do one thing, and do it well."
"Keep entanglements to a minimum".
"Keep everything as modular as possible."

How can it even be considered that a desktop is somehow entangled with 
an init system?
Supposing I bought a new fridge, and found my stove no longer worked?
Supposing I bought a new car from Toyota but it could only run on Toyota 
gas?

> Had I wanted this kind of overclever stuff, in which everything 
> "magically"
> (sort of) works but at the price of being a nightmare to 
> customize/debug, I
> would have installed ubuntu, not debian!
>
>
> Pretty please...
> Giacomo
>