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Author Topic: [EN] Debian technical committee votes for systemd over Upstart  (Read 6464 times)

Offline clubex

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[EN] Re: Debian technical committee votes for systemd over Upstart
« Reply #15 on: 2014/02/12, 13:11:33 »
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.

Offline devil

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Re: Debian technical committee votes for systemd over Upstart
« Reply #16 on: 2014/02/12, 14:28:11 »
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

Offline der_bud

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Re: Debian technical committee votes for systemd over Upstart
« Reply #17 on: 2014/02/12, 15:04:20 »
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}  (I shortened it a bit):
Quote
"...
- 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..."

« Last Edit: 2014/02/12, 15:21:43 by der_bud »
Du lachst? Wieso lachst du? Das ist doch oft so, Leute lachen erst und dann sind sie tot.

Offline melmarker

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Re: Debian technical committee votes for systemd over Upstart
« Reply #18 on: 2014/02/12, 21:58:18 »
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.
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. (Benjamin Franklin, November 11, 1755)
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. (Hanlons razor)

Offline clubex

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Re: Debian technical committee votes for systemd over Upstart
« Reply #19 on: 2014/02/13, 12:22:33 »
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.

Offline ralul

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Re: Debian technical committee votes for systemd over Upstart
« Reply #20 on: 2014/02/13, 18:36:13 »
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 ?
experiencing siduction runs better than my gentoo makes me know I know nothing