Siduction Forum
Siduction Forum => Free Speech => Topic started by: novalore on 2014/02/10, 16:26:42
-
Just read this and thought of you guys...
http://www.muktware.com/2014/02/debian-technical-committee-votes-systemd-upstart/20780
-
Do not hold your breath over this, that is not final. The vote is open until 'Feb. 15, and even though it looks like Systemd wins, anyone can still change their vote. And given how heated the process was, I do not believe anything until the vote is closed and the outcome officialy announced. Besides that there can (and very likely will be) a GR on this matter, be it now or in 1 year.
greetz
devil
-
It is my understanding from reading the bug of the tech committee process that any decision they might make will still not be binding on Debian as a community. They are only voting on what to recommend to the entire community. Maybe I am putting too fine of an interpretation on it, but that is the way I read it.
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=727708 (http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=727708)
Note that this discussion spans months of real time, i.e., it is long.
Tim
-
If the vote ends with systemd as winner, systemd will be in Jessie, unless stopped by a GR, which would need a simple majority to overthrow the vote of the TC.
greetz
devil
-
Was there any vote from a Canonical sponsored member of the TC that was in favor of systemd?
In the beginning of this "bug" was a discussion about this matter: These guys assured not to vote just in favor of Canonical but Debian as a whole !
? But what happened was just what everyone thought would happen :(
This is the perfect example about the danger to have a big sponsor :(
-
No, none of the 3 (2 current and 1 former Canonical employee) voted for systemd. 2 voted for upstart, one for further discussion (iirc) And yes, they should have said: we can help with technicakl issues in the discussion but we will abstain from voting. then 3 others would have voted instead.
greetz
devil
-
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Debian-Wahl-zum-Standard-Init-System-fuehrt-zu-Zank-2110695.html
and here we have the news update (in German), with the development towards GR becoming more likely. interestingly, siduction is mentioned in the last paragraph.
-
Google Translate doesn't help, much. ???
Tim
-
Timc, heise said
"falls Upstart das Rennen machen sollte; unter anderem die Siduction-Macher hatten bereits zum Jahresanfang angekündigt, bei ihrem Debian-Ableger voll auf Systemd setzen zu wollen, selbst wenn sich das Debian-Projekt für ein anderes Standard-Init-System entscheiden sollte."
Short translation:
Even if Upstart would be choosen, there will be Debian derivatives with systemd: Siduction has announced exactly this
-
Sogar der Ruf nach einer Debian-Abspaltung, die nicht auf Systemd setzt, wurde laut (https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00396.html).
"There was even a loud call for a (sysvinit) Debian fork".
Wow -- calling for a fork seems silly to me. A little improvement on the existing systemd wiki would be sufficient to let every Debian user set his system init as he or she chooses. This could be just another choice, like whether you want pulseaudio or not, and what is the default browser.
-
Hi,
I followed the discussion from time to time -as far (what is not so really far :) ) as I could of course-, but what now, in the heat after the vote, impressed me most is this letter from Russ Allbery:
I think it's worth to read and think over.
https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00390.html
greets
ayla
-
Yes, ayla, that is a well-balanced and thoughtful piece. Thank you.
Tim
-
Good article, Ayla -- Vielen Dank!
-
Ok, I take it back (dangerous sponsor) after reading Russ Allbery:
I favor systemd as the choice for Debian, so obviously I think it has
other features that are more compelling than those, or disagree with some
of those design goals. Making those sorts of value judgements is what
we're here to do. But I think it should be obvious that there is no need
to postulate some sort of Canonical influence or bias in order to see why
others believe there is a strong case to be made for upstart. Where you
see people who work for or have worked for Canonical, I see people *who
are familiar with upstart*, who know its advantages and disadvantages
well, and who have a very good feeling for how much effort is required to
work around its quirks. Due to that familiarity, they may understate some
of the disadvantages, since they're used to working around them, or
understate some systemd features, because they're not familiar with them.
But this is not bias; this is well within the judgement calls that we all
have to make every day as technical experts. There is no such thing as a
completely impartial review of technology, and you wouldn't want someone
who was completely impartial making technological decisions since it would
indicate a disturbing lack of familiarity with the problem area.
In short, you can certainly disagree with the relative weights of the
various features or drawbacks of any of the init systems. But I think at
the point at which one goes beyond "I disagree" to "and therefore you must
be biased," one has lost the plot. This is a hard decision with a lot of
subjective judgement, and reasonable people can arrive at opposite
conclusions.
Danke Ayla!
-
For readers that prefer german: I wrote an article pulling together what happened in the past few days on our most beloved debian thread:
http://www.pro-linux.de/news/1/20763/technischer-ausschuss-waehlt-systemd-zu-debians-neuem-init-system.html
greetz
devil
-
I have been on too many committees to know that positing a new direction will always cause a lot of friction between its members. That doesn't interest me as a good committee will resolve it's differences by knowing the facts and using good judgement. Everything else is personalities and we know where that leads; witness more talk about Snowden than his message.
No what really interests me is why Debian needs to get rid of sysvint and adopt a new init system? I've seen many articles supporting either systemd or upstart etc but none which stands somewhere in the middle and soberly explains why Debian needs to cease using sysvinit. Where is the argument which shows that sysvinit's deficiencies are so great and important enough to dispense with it all together? And where are the articles setting out the pros and cons of the various init systems in a cold unbiased manner? It strikes me that there is a lot of polarised opinion but not enough judgement.
It will be an important decision for Debian to make and all of us who wish to use Debian should have the facts (not opinions) so we can make our own judgements.
-
Did you follow the thread? [https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=727708]. I know it is a lot to read, but it has everything you ask for. Sysvinit could go on working for a couple of years, but there is a lot of bad workarounds in it, that are held together more by spit than by glue. One example is it's handling of fstab in nowadays systems.
If you have to make a decision sooner or later and a superiour system is available, why not do it now and by that stay in touch with the rest of the linux world?
greetz
devil
-
clubex, don't know how good your german is or if goole-tranlate would help, but a summary why that discussion started in october 2013 is here: http://www.pro-linux.de/news/1/20406/debian-ruft-seinen-technischen-ausschuss-zur-klaerung-ueber-das-kuenftige-i.html
As an overview of available initsystems for debian and one starting point to collect pros/cons was this debian wiki page: https://wiki.debian.org/Debate/initsystem/
There you will find besides other things "contra sysvinit" statements as arguments or comparisons in some of the subchapters.
And third, a summary from an older article called The Debian Init System Deba{te|cle} (http://www.linuxadvocates.com/2013/10/the-debian-init-system-debatecle.html) (I shortened it a bit):
"...
- Sysvinit lacks service supervision. While /etc/inittab provides this capability, management of /etc/inittab is quite restrictive...
- Sysvinit does not track dependencies between services. Insserv/startpar provides this on top of sysvinit, but this is again very much a bolt-on, and only handles dependencies at boot/shutdown time (i.e., during runlevel changes) and can't handle any complicated service interdependencies at runtime...
- Sysvinit requires complex shell scripts for each service. While some of the complexity has been abstracted out into common helpers (lsb-functions; start-stop-daemon), having to represent each service's start/stop handling as a program is a severe handicap...
- Sysvinit is linear. It stopped being a good fit for boot management on Debian the moment Debian adopted udev. There are many race conditions that persist in Debian today when booting with sysvinit, and although these may be fixable, the complexity for fixing them with sysvinit is very high. We're better off switching to an init system that's designed to work together with the event-based kernel and udev..."
-
clubex: for us the descision was easy - all flavours except of gnome work well with sysvinit. all flavours. gnome included, works well with systemd. So we take systemd to provide a good user experience for all flavours. Beside of that, systemd will help us to remove some crufty code from siduction - i think its the same with debian.
-
Thanks guys.
I guess as devil suggests I'm going to have to read the bug thread.
Hopefully Debian will publish a more formal document when the final decision has been made.
-
As far as I know
The next Debian will be able to boot using SysV but Gnome
The next next Debian is undecided, possibly not able to boot using SysV
... but perhaps there will come SystemE ?