←back to thread

466 points CoolCold | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.296s | source
Show context
kbar13 ◴[] No.40208219[source]
systemd has been a net positive for the linux ecosystem. remember when you had to write bash scripts to start, stop, restart services and handle any other signals you want to send it? nowadays it's a unit file (basically just an ini file) away with relatively straightforward API. and you can actually declare startup dependencies and other useful relationships past just "prepend a number signifying when it should run globally to the front of the filename". it's provided an extensible platform with which higher level orchestration frameworks like ansible / ignition can easily templatize services or other system configuration.

since the beginning of systemd people have moaned about how complex it is and how we're reinventing the wheel. yet time and time again the people actually working on the project show that the solution they've come up with is the result of the problem they're facing on a daily basis. it's quite annoying that the armchair linux experts complain about how "lol systemd is so stupid for reinventing the wheel, give me my shell scripts back", maybe think about whether or not you have a legitimate issue not being addressed by the solution proposed or if you are just getting rage baited by a headline.

replies(17): >>40208249 #>>40208286 #>>40208374 #>>40208481 #>>40209110 #>>40209185 #>>40212620 #>>40212965 #>>40214704 #>>40214800 #>>40214923 #>>40215163 #>>40215552 #>>40215793 #>>40216445 #>>40217144 #>>40217617 #
Faaak ◴[] No.40208286[source]
Yeah, basically I've found that the people the more vocal against systemd are either not really knowing how it works behind the scenes, and just criticizing for the sake of it (or because other people do so), or criticizing from an ideological point of view (do one thing and do it well). They see systemd as an octopus, not following the unix ideology. Which I don't really agree tbh
replies(4): >>40208422 #>>40209002 #>>40212740 #>>40218038 #
jacoblambda ◴[] No.40212740[source]
The issue is that it's not just ideological. "Do one thing and do it well" is important because if you want to port software to another platform, it's a lot easier to port a single dependency component over to make it work than it is to port over the entire framework.

This is a serious problem and it makes it way harder to make things cross platform.

replies(1): >>40215134 #
Xylakant ◴[] No.40215134[source]
Systemd was written specifically for Linux, hard depends on a list of features provided by the Linux kernel and leverages them to do its work. Porting it to another kernel is a rewrite. Lack of portability is in this case a design tradeoff.
replies(2): >>40215607 #>>40215608 #
1. jacoblambda ◴[] No.40215607[source]
Sure that is the case for systemd itself but it's not the case for most projects that happen to use things systemd provides.

There is very little benefit for most userspace software to tie itself to systemd and by extension linux when otherwise it could be portable to any unix or unix like platform. Especially when an alternative, portable solution already exists and is well established.