First things first: I'm Steve Litt, using the same email address I've used since 1996. You may or may not believe me a troll, but you have to admit I'm not some guy coming around yet again with new email address, trying to fool everybody.
Anyway, I don't think a dislike of systemd is, by necessity, offtopic. Systemd is a substantial change, not only in the operating system, but in philosophy. Unix was built as a sort of Erector Set emphasizing a bunch of small parts that could be bolted together, with each part doing one thing and doing it well. Where else can you write an entire data processing application with a pipeline of repeated grep, sed, awk, sort, and cut?. With the advent of GUI, some compromises were made to the Unix Philosophy, but command line Linux in all distros has always adhered pretty well to the Unix Philosophy. In the case of Debian, even the GUI adheres to the Unix Philosophy pretty well, a point that separates Debian from Ubuntu, Mint, and OS/x. In the beginning, booting up was just a bunch of shellscripts. Crude, but effective, and everything reachable with Vim or vi. Then there was that upstart thing: a little more convoluted, but still somewhat conformant to the Unix Philosophy. Now comes systemd, which, from what I've heard, is a further step away from the Unix Philosophy, in that it is more monolithic and exerts more control and more continuous control over all programs, from what I understand. And most un-Unix of all, from what I understand it has binary log files. The DOS (and Windows) Philosophy was one of monolith, with hooks into the monolith via autoexec.bat, config.sys, and (later) the registry. Programs were big and binary, with binary inputs and output files readable only by the specific program, or a converter or program with an importer or exporter. The Unix philosophy is a bunch of parts configured together, mainly communicating with readable text, and if you want to change things, you reconfigure. In other words, from what I hear about systemd, it would be more acceptable in Windows. And all this begs the question: Why fix something that's already working just fine? And why fix it with something that's more monolithic and black boxy, with binary log files that are going to a problem if you must go in with a rescue disc. It looks to me like the main goals are to boot faster, and to tie everything together better. As far as tying everything together, that's what I want to avoid. And as far as booting quickly, Linux people don't boot often, so the only time this is relevant is those maintaining a very strict level of service, for whom theoretically systemd could be a (welcome) option. My plan is to switch to systemd, see how I like it, and if I don't, install the old boot system, or if that can no longer be done, switch distros. I don't see systemd as the end of the world. *But*, I think a discussion of a plan B is very ontopic, because if the conversion to systemd turns out to be even 1/10 the fiasco that the kmail to kmail2 change was, we all need a systemd alternative, and a plan to make that switch. SteveT Steve Litt * http://www.troubleshooters.com/ Troubleshooting Training * Human Performance -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20140705142557.3b9a1...@mydesq2.domain.cxm
