I'm sorry if language barrier is a problem for you, however that is your problem. You chose to argue in English, if you can't form the argument in English then just give up because I'm not going to give you a pass because you are unable to communicate.

http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/OpenRC#Features

Please describe how it is "hackery". You can have the same form of chaotic process termination within cgroups with systemd. One thing that worries me is that I'm starting to read about systemd being used to keep bad processes running - welcome to the new Windows, oh it's broke just restart it till it's fixed!

Agreed.

It's meant to keep daemons alive when needed.
While you can disable this in systemd, you can't enable this in openrc (and no, I don't really like all that either).

That's a huge problem. If we are electing to keep (bad) daemons started instead of finding and fixing the root cause, we are doing it wrong as engineers. That is a huge argument against systemd, it allows poor sysadmins to be poor sysadmins rather than forcing them to fix their problems.

I hope it is disabled by default..

Thanks for your insight on systemd in this thread, Andrew. I certainly know more now than when I started it. And I like systemd even less. As I said somewhere else, systemd seems to be a solution in search of a problem (and a poor one, at that).

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To be honest I'm not smart enough to have an opinion either way, but I have enough trust in Pat to know that if systemd is ever included in Slackware it will only be because it is stable and worthy of inclusion. That's the reason I use Slackware... because I don't feel like a beta-tester.

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Frankly as a desktop multimedia end-user, the init system doesn't really matter to me as long as it works. I use a mix of Slackware, and Arch Linux, and they both work great. It's just an init system, not an ideology. If Slackware adopts systemd at some point in the future, so be it. If it doesn't... So be it.

I leave it up to the maintainers to decide.

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Similar to what digger95 said, I am not smart enough to understand all the consequences of systemd to my system.

On the other hand, I am not completely ignorant of them either!

I am smart enough to know how the init system currently works, and to know the benefits of Slackware's BSD-style init scripts for me, as both user and system administrator. And I understand that systemd will change that, or take that away from me without offering any clear, compelling reasons to do so.

I had issues with HAL, but managed to keep things working... I have had issues with udev, but manage to keep things working... but I am also smart enough to know that systemd will not be a magic cure for all that was wrong with hal, udev, etc... it will just be one more new thing to try to keep working - but at the expense of all that I currently know how to do - just another treadmill.

As is often stated, systemd and a few other new toys break with the Unix-philosophy in important and non-trivial ways. Dumb as I am, I am smart enough to recognize the real and immediate value of that philosophy to me in ways too numerous to list! It is tangible to me, even if others say there is no such thing!

I am smart enough to know that the shared Unix heritage and code base of Linux and BSD is a good and tangible and valuable thing - to me! And I am smart enough to know that breaking that link, as systemd will do, is a bad thing on its face.

So, no, I do not know all the ins and outs of systemd. But I know this:

Systemd will cause harm to many aspects of my computing world - it has a cost... and despite having read much about it in the past few months, I cannot yet identify a single, clear, easily stated advantage that it brings... it has no visible benefits to offset that cost.

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Yup, that's it, in a nutshell.

Why oh why do people keep saying this without understanding anything about systemd?

I honestly expect more from Slackware users.
It's no more than a ******* init system.

Scouts Honour, systemd will not ruin your life!

Further more, I honestly don't care either.
Slackware is a full package that never disappointed me and I'll keep using it no matter what init Pat finds feasible for his project.

Why do people keep saying this without any understanding or acknowledgement of the Unix philosophy?

I do not need to fully understand systemd to know that it is harmful to me any more than I need to understand the pathology of toxins to know that a rattlesnake bite is harmful to me.

"I honestly expected more from you Ripley." - Carter Burke, Aliens


"We're here to help! Don't believe what your eyes see! Don't trust what your ears hear! Trust me!" - See any history book, any period for multiple sources, or watch the evening news.

I need something a little more concrete that that...

Clever twist of words for someone with poor english skills, implying that Pat is looking for a new init system.

But that in a way is exactly the point - Pat long ago found an init system, based on SysV-init and BSD-style scripts, which is in no small way responsible for Slackware never having disappointed! And to my knowledge he is not looking for another one (although I defer to him on that point). He, and other distributions, are not looking for something feasible, they are having one more or less forced upon them.

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Great movie... just saying.

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But that's just it. We already have one of those and I, for one, am perfectly comfortable with it as it stands. It is stable, flexible, extensible, proven and easily understood. Why should it be replaced?

Having done a fair amount of reading on this topic, I have to say that the outright defensiveness of the people involved in the systemd project is probably the main thing which has turned me away from it. There is also a lot of conflicting information floating around. Some of it is from the developers themselves, which only adds to the confusion and uncertainty around this thing.

For me, this whole argument is a little bit of history repeating. I've seen many "heated discussions" online regarding different styles of init system. It is one thing which can really drive a wedge between Slackware and Debian users. Any discussion between them on this topic will often result in the kind argument we're seeing here. It seems that it is one area where people's opinions are strong, and there is often a high level of reluctance toward change.

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If starting cgroups and parallel loading of resources can be accomplished from sysvinit, then why do we need systemd at all? The purpose of systemd isn't to effectively replace sysvinit or even bsdinit, the purpose goes deeper than that. Systemd is designed to basically cut off non-Linux operating systems from software like the various BSD and other UNIX branded systems.

The UNIX Philosophy as stated in my signature is to "do one thing, and do it well".

Now feed into this the meaning of that statement:

That means that whatever the software, the software that is used, must do at LEAST one thing, but it has to do it well enough that it's near perfection in terms of usefulness and sustainability.

SysVInit follows the UNIX Philosophy completely. SysVInit is the perfect INIT system, it's flexible if you want it to be flexible such as adding cgroups support, and it can load either using linear or parallel styles. However, it's small enough to not be a load on the system and waste resources.

As Astro stated, it has no benefits to offset the costs, and this is true. If SysVInit can be scripted, updated, and patched to do what you need, how you need it, when, and why.... then SysVInit has more than paid for itself all over again offsetting the entire cost of systemd making systemd completely worthless, useless, and fairly much unnecessary.

And to unSpawn, I apologize for my behavior, but I don't have any qualms in knowing I was wrong in some areas, nor wish to retract anything said. I stand by my statements, and if I must unlearn things to relearn them, then I must.

It can't.
That is, not without insane (make that close to impossible) complexity ... and all on the user side.
see: https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documenta...ps/cgroups.txt

cgroup is an already existing kernel function that isn't used by any traditional init.

I don't think it's "Inevitable", the nice thing about the free software world is that nothing is really inevitable - if Pat and crew can't get systemd to work as well as or better than the current init system, they can leave it out. Even if Slackware ends up the only distro left without systemd, it's up to the Slackware team.

Personally, I don't care either way. I don't like systemd, but I'm not worried about it ruining my life or whatever. I use it on a Fedora box (my "what broke now?" machine, so I can keep my production computer running smoothly and still play with the newest shiniest stuff) and it's been mostly harmless since fedora 16 left alpha.

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