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Comment by _delirium | Hacker News Reader

Isn't systemd still optional in Debian? I know there is worry that since it's the default, packages won't necessarily be well-tested without it, but afaik you can still remove it, just by installing sysvinit: http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Debian_Stretch

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Theoretically, yes. In reality, not so much.

I blocked the install of systemd way back. Recently I tried to upgrade postgres+postgis. Turned out that postgis had a dependency on a package with had a dependency on a package which had a dependency on another package which had a dependency on systemd.

So I tried compiling it myself. One of te build dependencies had a dependency on a package which had a dependency on a package which, you guessed it, had a dependency on systemd.

I finally gave up and moved the database over to a jail on my freebsd box.

I had the same reaction to the initial announcement of a fork, and it's taken three years to get to an RC.

(The whole systemd tempest in the tiniest, most awkward of teacups never made a lick of sense to me--in no small part because, like 99% of people, the only time I ever interact with it is when I throw a service declaration out there, and Noah Kantrowitz's fantastic `poise-service` Chef cookbook abstracts that away for me.)

I spent a day fighting to get systemd to properly handle bind mounts on boot. It doesn't reliably mount them and there are tons of blog and forum posts complaining about it. It also surprised us that it doesn't obey the "bg" flag for NFS. You have to use "nofail" instead.

I have been informed today that a new MySQL cluster built at work on CentOS 7.3 doesn't reliably start MySQL on boot.

We have none of these problems with our FreeBSD servers. systemd eats away at my time every week and I loathe it. It might not be a nuisance for endusers but it's a nightmare for sysadmins.

MySQL is a topic of discussion on the systemd-devel mailing list right now, coincidentally.

* https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2017-Ap...

The finger pointing in this thread is astonishing

it's a nightmare for sysadmins

Many times this.

As a Devuan user (not a dev), it's more than just the init system though. Devuan is also doing lots of heavy lifting to keep udev separate from systemd, as well as other things (consolekit and polkit come to mind, as does dbus).

At this point systemd is a whole lot more than an init system. Most people don't have a complaint with regards to systemd units or how fast it boots, it's more to do with the amount of dependencies it seems to be sucking in (at least from my experience).

> Devuan is also doing lots of heavy lifting to keep udev separate from systemd

So they do nothing as udev and systemd already are separate packages in Debian?

udev is part of the systemd code repository, and is not supported in systemd-less setups by upstream.

"Separate packages" does not imply "no dependencies".

And what does Devuan do?

Hint: udev in Devuan is just the unmodified Debian package. So much for the "heavy lifting" done by Devuan in the last years.

And udev w/o systemd is still supported upstream, just not building only udev (one also builds the systemd binaries and throws them away).

You both need to see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11609980

You mean the "This system is mothballed."?

So, one person tried to write a replacement for udev and gave up. What should that tell me?

it is "optional". unless you run a headless server or a barebones desktop system with very carefully selected packages it is impossible to not install systemd because logind & pam dependencies are littered everywhere. Using sysvinit as pid 1 is achieved by installing systemd-shim, which still depends on systemd and uses systemd files and systemd is still run anyway, just not as pid1.

so yeah, there is practically no way to escape from systemd in Debian using vanilla packages.

I've been running Jessie without systemd on my laptop for a couple years now. Never had to worry about packages not working, except for vbox not building it's driver. But that's probably some issue with backports, and I don't care enough about vbox to actually look into it. Systemd is installed though and apparently used for udev and logind.

Edits: I should review before posting.

Sounds like your laptop isn't "without systemd" in that case.

Background information on how Devuan came to existence can be found here: https://devuan.org/os/debian-fork/

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