Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway54095 | Hacker News Reader

My POV: SystemD is a software driven not really by technical, but political reasons by RedHat, to put the most important parts of a GNU/Linux system under their control. (Appart from the kernel of course). It is modular, but also dependant as a whole, so in the end, it spreads almost like an invasion, slowly leaving the admins not other option than accepting it. That's quite off from the Unix philosophy (do one thing, do it well, be really modular)... so my conclusion going back to the beggining, that didn't happen by mistake, but is a deliberate design choice, with shaddy political reasons behind it, so I reject it. And then we could talk about the convenience or not of putting such amount of tools and complexity under PID 1, the crazy binary logs, the weird behavior of the service utilities, and the possibility of being able to modify/add services using regular scripts instead of binary excutables...

View on HN

> My POV: SystemD is a software driven not really by technical, but political reasons by RedHat, to put the most important parts of a GNU/Linux system under their control.

it's really a dumb POV to have, given that systemd is FOSS (licensed LGPLv2.1+) like most of the software that red hat produces.

as a sysadmin, systemd is a godsend. really, it brings uniformity and waaay better debuggability/predictability and tooling in system startup and configuration and troubleshooting.

and, again, systemd is foss so red hat hasn't really that much control over other distros (and each distro had its own internal discussion and choose freely to adopt it).

on another side, red hat took the time and spent the money to bring that improvement to the world. other people just complain under the shield of a throwaway hn account.

I think people's beef with it is that it's hard to understand when things go wrong, Lennart's projects don't leave the best initial impression, and it's had significant scope creep since it was initially introduced.

well in fairness systemd's task (managing the system) is fairly complex as well.

I am not surprised I had to actually sit down and go through a short course on systemd and read some of the manpages to understand it enough and profit off its presence.

And that's the rub - it was initially advertised as a quick way to start the system, which is a simple enough concept to understand, then changed its scope to manage the entire system/service land.

It also ended up being tightly coupled, with poorly documented APIs and major bugs, which drew the ire of some longer-term professionals.

I don't think the idea systemd shim layer of services is necessarily bad, but I do think that having its design and implementation centralized within Red Hat isn't the best ; it would be nice if there was a complement to the Linux foundation doing its development, as having the process be managed by someone as competent as respected as Linus would go a long way into quieting the storm around it.

> but I do think that having its design and implementation centralized within Red Hat

oh don't be silly.

systemd's development is not centralized at all.

it's LGPL licensed and its developent happens on github at https://github.com/systemd/systemd -- anybody is free to fork it off to another project -- yet pretty much nobody does, how comes that?

PS. I was expecting the kind of answers I received... as the whole subject stinks, talking about it stinks even more. What I wasn't waiting is to see people, in another time caring and loving this OS quietly yielding about such a big insanity. Thinking right now specially about Debian and ArchLinux mantainers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com