Re: How about a fork of Jessie without systemd?

On Mon, May 23, 2016 at 04:18:17PM -0700, Greg KH wrote:
> On Mon, May 23, 2016 at 11:51:53PM +0200, Tomasz Rola wrote:
> > So you are happy with systemd, fine. And you claim it is
> > great. Cool. Myself, I could not care less if it is good or bad, given
> > that I have no technical need it could help me to with. But I have to
> > care, because judging how things seem to be I expect there will be
> > growing pressure to lock Linux in. It is possible - for a while - to
> > have init processes as they used to be, but this is not going to
> > last. Gentoo and Slackware will have to adopt systemd too, sooner or
> > later. And everybody who is going to run Linux kernel will have to run
> > systemd.
> > 
> > At least this is how I see it.
> 
> But what's wrong with that?  Before you were all running a fork of init
> scripts, all hacked up in odd ways that were not compatible across any
> distro.  What has changed here?

This kind of argument has disputable value. I expect there will
"always" be an OS or flavour of some with "fork of init scripts" and
they will choose to not run systemd or they will choose to give it as
an option. And if Apache folks wanted to run theirs on such OS, they
will have to somehow support such scripts anyway. And so on. So I do
not see systemd as anything close to solving a problem. The problem is
there, granted, and it would be nice to have a solution but I would
like to have few options, rather than being told I have to use systemd
in order to use Apache. In such case, I will go with something that
does not depend on systemd, just like I go now with things that do not
depend on Windows. Because once you start depending on Windows, you
are in a prison. Once you start depending on Java, you are in another
prison. And so on. Once you start depending on Linux... you cannot
switch to FreeBSD overnight and this makes life a little bit
complicated and interesting.

> Would you rather run something as pid-1 that only a few developers have
> ever looked at (i.e. your specific fork), or one that hundreds of
> developers have looked at and are maintaining?

I would rather run something that I find acceptable. So far I have
read too much critique of systemd to just install it without
objection and further inspection.

So I would not welcome systemd on my computer, but I am fine with
others happily running it (if this is what they want). But then there
is my suspicion there is going to be no choice. Right now it is
transition time, but like I wrote pressure etc will do the job.

And it would be wrong if things went that way. See, I appreciate that
people can use software they choose. You can edit your code with
whatever editor you like and I am cool about it as long as I can edit
mine with Emacs. If there was Linuxwide adoption of some, say,
Sublimetext and in such way that I could expect more and more
obstacles with compiling & installing my copy of Emacs, this would not
make me happy. And it does not matter if Sublimetext is better
editor. In this fictional case, Emacs is a bit more than just editor
and Sublimetext is not going to replace all of it.

Likewise, I am surprised that people are using Unity (tried it, not
liked it) but again, I see nothing wrong about it, but myself, I run
fvwm. I was using kde and old gnome for few years, but once they
started to misbehave, I went back to fvwm. Old configs almost worked
after 15 years, I just had to do few edits (the years do not add up
because I was also long time afterstep user, but they screwed it and I
never looked back).

It seems to be so much different with systemd. There is a number of
people who dislike it for various reasons, and I am willing to pay
attention. Yet one distro after another, systemd is being chosen as
the right thing to do. Honestly, if this was the case with Emacs, if
you were told this is going to be *the editor* for every Linux from
now on, would you feel it as something good? Even I would feel uneasy
about it, because I have enough reason to understand that Emacs is not
for everybody, and even if it was, everybody should be given a choice
if and when to start using it. And I still keep using Vim quite often,
even learn doing new things with it, because Emacs is not for every
use case either.

-- 
Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:[email protected]             **
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