vezzy-fnord

A good time as any to quote Joseph de Maistre:

"Every man has certain duties to perform, and the extent of these duties depends on his position in society and the extent of his means. The same action is by no means equally culpable when committed by two different men. Not to stray from our subject, the same act which results only from a mistake or a foolish characteristic in an obscure person, thrust suddenly into unlimited power, could be a foul crime in a bishop or a duke or a peer.

Indeed, some actions, which are excusable and even praiseworthy from an ordinary point of view, are fundamentally infinitely criminal. For example, if someone says, I have espoused the cause of the French Revolution in good faith, through a pure love of liberty and my country; I have believed in my soul and conscience that it would lead to the reform of abuses and to the general good, we have nothing to say in reply. But the eye of him who sees into every heart discerns the stain of sin; he discovers in a ridiculous misunderstanding, in a small puncturing of pride, in a base or criminal passion, the prime moving force behind those ambitions we wish to present to the world as noble: and for him the crime is compounded by grafting the falsehood of hypocrisy onto treason. But let us look at the nation in general.

One of the greatest possible crimes is undoubtedly an attack upon sovereignty, no other having such terrible consequences. If sovereignty resides in one man and this man falls victim to an outrage, the crime of lese-majesty augments the atrocity. But if this sovereign has not deserved his fate through any fault of his own, if his very virtues have strengthened the guilty against him, the crime is beyond description. This is the case in the death of Louis XVI; but what is important to note is that never has such a great crime had more accomplices. The death of Charles I had far fewer, even though it was possible to bring charges against him that Louis XVI did not merit. Yet many proofs were given of the most tender and courageous concern for him; even the executioner, who was obliged to obey, did not dare to make himself known. But in France, Louis XVI marched to his death in the middle of 60,000 armed men who did not have a single shot for their king, not a voice was raised for the unfortunate monarch, and the provinces were as silent as the capital. We would expose ourselves, it was said. Frenchmen - if you find this a good reason, talk no more of your courage or admit that you misuse it!"

s/French Revolution/BLM

You're basically taking systemd's architecture as an axiomatic premise, so no surprise your conclusion is obvious. I reject the premise, and the fruits of it I go into detail in chapter 3.

For the record I am mostly a Unix-hater, so your complaints about Unix are things I agree with. systemd, however, is simply more New Jersey design with unwarranted pretensions.

systemd, in a way, is exactly the init system that a community as infantile and disordered as Linux rightfully deserves. May they enjoy it.

I'll leave things at that.

Regardless, I did have at least some expectation that people would actually focus on the original post and not brawl in the comment section over tangents that often aren't even part of it.

Oh, well. And hey, if other people down the road read this and it makes something click for them, I'll be happy with that.

> The core problem has already moved to a different area and that's why it really doesn't matter if they are doing a bad job.

Yes, I agree.

Still, the losers of history deserve their voice, too.

"Nobody" is a significant overstatement. A lot of (certainly not all) daemons that used to only support double-forking and PID files were fixed in the wake of daemontools. systemd and other init systems benefited from this work when they appeared. Still, PID files are subject to TOCTTOU regardless of what you use, so that's a given.

So far as prior art is concerned, see my old post: https://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/09/05/0/

I would also point out OpenWrt's procd as an example of how to have hotplug-capable service management at a fraction of the complexity: https://openwrt.org/docs/techref/procd

Now, this rethinking did indeed come with HAL, when the idea of a master daemon and ad-hoc service manager reacting to hardware state changes was unanimously rejected by the Linux patriciate as wrong. Perhaps with systemd they will one day reach the same epiphany for system and user services. Either way, I'm not terribly personally invested in this anymore -- I just figured I'd wrap my thoughts up on an issue that occupied a good deal of my time years ago.

EDIT: As to B, the problem of process supervision and having an idiomatic way of daemonizing has been solved for a long time: https://jdebp.eu/FGA/unix-daemon-design-mistakes-to-avoid.ht...

I realize that you have been one of the more visible members of the pro-systemd side for years now, so I'd definitely like a more coherent rebuttal to both the historical and technical sections.

Of course, you'd probably consider any kind of response to be undignified, and I understand.

Many people have compared free software to communism. I always used to dismiss it. But, in a way, they were right. Both are movements with a self-conceited historicist endeavor to eliminate exploiting classes ('it is inevitable that the tendency for the rate of profit to fall to produce immiseration as capitalists can no longer profitably invest, leading to a proletarian seizure of power' versus 'it is inevitable that proprietary walled garden development models stagnate as they're overtaken by decentralized communities pooling their knowledge and labor into the most optimal end' and create a perfectly equitable free association of producers no longer having their surplus value be seized by exploiters.

One degenerates into a repressive bureaucratic collectivist (I'm not a Trotskyist, but it's a good term) mechanism for reproducing surplus through either direct requisition or coercive planning. The other degenerates into a way for large-scale cloud providers to appropriate the free labor of volunteers so as to reinvest it back in their walled gardens.

Stalin represented the Leninist wing against ultra-leftists, anarchists and other factions who were against tight top-down organization in favor of 'spontaneous' organizing, and the GNOME/Freedesktop/Red Hat nexus is against the faction in free software that insists on a loosely coordinated and loosely coupled bazaar without a central vision. But in no sense has systemd abolished this, it has only reduced a few nodes at best.

EDIT: Actually I should point out that 'free software' per se is a deontological argument, and it's 'open source' specifically which specifically uses these historicist arguments to justify itself. But then open source was unabashedly an effort for corporate sanitization of free software, which most people forgot after it mostly crowded out 'free software.'

When it comes to Upstart, it was almost never used except as a wrapper around initscripts. Effectively you booted from Upstart which greedily synthesized all of its 'events' on startup that in turn triggered initscripts, which brought some degree of parallelism and that was about it. The reverse-dependency 'start/stop on' model was too esoteric, and Upstart's state machine brittle. Hilariously enough, the only system to actually use Upstart to its fullest (still does) is ChromeOS.

Prior to systemd and Upstart, as I discuss in chapter 1, distro developers either simply added various preprocessors for initscripts to introduce dependency headers, or they had these vague hunches of 'waiting for Godot' that we could either replace init entirely with D-Bus, put D-Bus interfaces in initscripts, or some other roundabout way that involved grafting D-Bus. Much of this was owing to the 'irrational exuberance' of Linux developers wanting to hotplug the world after 2003-4, but it always remains an on-and-off effort with the people behind it never certain what they want.

Indeed, besides grunt work of optimizing initscripts, I point out that as late as 2009 distros like Debian were still very concerned about LSB-compliance, and that even when they were willing to adopt a new fancy event-driven init like Upstart, it was conditional on reusing tools like insserv to parse LSB headers, and on incorporating initscripts for service management. Also the entire bizarre diversion that the Debian group had of using a Perl script to generate initscripts.

So far as I know, the daemontools approach was never influential. The available dichotomy was between putting lipstick on a pig, and utopian dreaming.

The paradox remains: how can we trust that the same people who did the Wrong Thing so persistently then suddenly turned out and did the Right Thing like they hit jackpot? If anything, 'jackpot' is the right analogy -- it was a fluke. And the same integration failures that were had with sysvinit have now been shifted into wrestling systemd's job model.

"Unification" was a folly, as the distro is still the place that gets its finger pointed at if upstream can't deliver, and upstream insists it's "just" offering a bunch of "modular tools," which ironically was supposed to be the problem to be addressed! Besides, there is still a whole world of Linux devices out there running Busybox, musl, OpenWrt, etc. that are outside the systemd bubble. Or think of all the container images running Alpine (which is also the basis of postmarketOS). Linux is still the same bazaar it always logically must be, but with a new class distinction added to the mix.

Not for long, probably. I drifted out of this sphere years ago, and came back specifically for systemd's 10 year anniversary, as I felt obligated to at least do that.

Judging by the tone of the comments, 10 years later is still too soon to discuss systemd dispassionately, but when I come back in 10 more years I'll see if things have changed.

Anyone who uses the term "neoliberalism" is a charlatan. It is an absurd conspiracy theory that has since blown into an amorphous meme out of Marxist historiographers who struggle with the explanatory power (or lack thereof) of their framework.

Mathematical models do have their uses in formalizing assumptions and analyzing dependencies, so they're not all bad, even if the Cowles Commission did go overboard.

(Also let's not forget that the modern methodology of economics came as a result of the Keynesian research program, particularly since Hicks (1937)'s introduction of IS-LM, first modeled by Keynes himself in 1933 as four simultaneous equations.)

There's your problem. Such grandiose visions might have passed for a 1930s-era technocrat, but are laughable today.

Either way, dissent is futile. Jump to a niche distro or ditch GNU/Linux entirely if systemd bothers you.

The argument from bad people is a false one, largely because bad people are people and hence do everything that people in general do. As a result, it can be applied to anything. If it's a universally valid point for the prohibition of anything, then it is cognitively meaningless.

Nor is it all absurd to believe that a ruler is ambivalent over their subjects. Why would such a thing be absurd? The state and political power are not instrumentalist concepts. We must apply behavioral symmetry to all power elites.

(It's also amusing to see "incomplete information" brought up again. That's the same pseudohistory used to justify Iraq in retrospect.)

Ideal scenarios of worker cooperatives and revolutionary syndicalism haven't at all materialized. Instead, it has led to platformist organizations that are the laughing stock of anarchism. Don't forget that Georges Sorel's idea of national syndicalism developed from his Marxist revisionism ended up giving us Spanish and Italian fascism.

[1] http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb27....

Americans have deified their Founding Fathers to such an absurd extent that they seem to be unable to think critically. That maybe Hamilton and Madison were engaging in wishful thinking. That maybe the anti-federalists were right. That maybe Henry Clay's American System and his antecedent in Hamilton largely botched the ideal separation-of-powers republic from the beginning.

It seems to me like a lot of left-leaning commentators have a sort of vested interest in maintaining this pseudohistorical divide between "embedded liberalism" from around 1946-1974 and the "neoliberal" period since then. Many of them never lived through or remembered this period (neither have I), so it serves as a sort of utopian benchmark of hope that we should return to.

A more accurate picture to me would be a virtually constant period of state-merchant/corporate coalition since the mercantilist era after the dismantling of feudal relations, to the present.

(After all, it was the Golden Age of Capitalism when the Truman Doctrine was in full effect and the United States had some of its greatest foreign policy ventures, a true renaissance for the military-industrial complex.)

Rand is a relic and has largely been repudiated by far superior scholars (such as Murray N. Rothbard) who have since made most of her work deprecated.

Then again, it depends on how you've loaded your definition of capitalism.

Profits are a motivation to act, but they may be nonpecuniary and psychic. Nor is "earning money" the ultimate goal in any sense, insofar as holding nominal money balances as a store of value becomes intractable with greater capacity. Now, subpar monetary and financial arrangements may distort savings-investment decisions, but this is not an intrinsic market deficiency.

Regretting your decisions ex ante is inherent to humanity, not to economic systems.

Regulation is and has emerged endogenously. Guilds, unions, standards agencies and other quality assurance bodies arise without state action.