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Comment by crazy_hombre | Hacker News Reader

systemd unit files are text files, not binary blobs. And it is much easier to grok a unit file than a 500 line init script.

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At what cost? Thats not the enirety of systemds complexity curve.

Your systemd unit file is backed by pages and pages of docs that must be comprehended to understand and hack on. Unix developers have all they need from the script. Furthermore, its all in context of existing unix concepts and thus your unix experiance is paying dividends.

Now you're just exaggerating. Are you really saying spending 5-10 mins skimming through a couple of man pages is that hard? Are you saying that a lot of documentation is a bad thing? (I thought FreeBSD fans liked to harp about their handbook..) And besides, there are already hundreds of systemd unit files on your system that you can easily copy and make relevant changes for your own services. Not having to deal with finicky shell features is a major advantage IMO.

I think the disconnect we're having is your inability to perceive complexity. And I don't blame you, it's not easy to quantify. I suggest you start with, Out of the Tar Pit by Ben Moseley. I'm not knocking on documentation, it's a vital property that I consider when adopting new technology.

What I'm saying is that systemds documentation currency (if you accept my metaphor) is spent on covering its accidental complexity and it's voluminous. If you disagree with me, that's fine. This is just my experience as a linux user that's had to deal with systemd.

If your claim is that systemd man pages are well written documentation then I think you're exaggerating and I'll wager you've relied on stackoverflow examples or tutorial blogs to solve your systemd issues--because I have. The reason for this is because the number of concepts and abstractions that you have to piece together to solve your problem is massive. But yeah, it's just a 5 line Unit file. I prefer strawberry kool-aid, thanks.

I genuinely don't see what's so complex about a service unit file. It's a simple INI file that has multiple sections that describes the service, tells what command to run and specifies any dependencies. It's literally the same thing that init scripts do except in a much more concise and efficient manner. And as I said before, there's a ton of systemd service unit files on any Linux system that you can take a look at and use as inspiration for your own services. Taking a little time to learn the ways of systemd is not a huge burdensome task like you're making it seem to be. I don't see why you think everyone should conflate systemd with complexity.

And about the voluminous documentation, well man pages are supposed to be comprehensive and cover every single aspect of the tools being described. They're not there to just be an intro to systemd for new users and administrators. If you want something like that, look no further than the "systemd for Administrators" series of articles written by the systemd author himself. https://github.com/shibumi/systemd-for-administrators/blob/m....

> I genuinely don't see what's so complex about a service unit file

It't not the unit file that's the problem, it's the mountains of junk, low quality C code written by an obnoxious, arrogant twit named "Linux Puttering" who has proven for 15+ years he couldn't care less about code quality or system reliability.

Besides the anecdotes shared by others over the years about the horrible experiences they've had with systemd, I have one of my own to share. When developing my own distro to escape the bloated, laggy hell that is Ubuntu, I started the build on my existing Ubuntu system. I found out the hard way that accidentally double mounting virtual filesystems on the target volume causes systemd to crash the system after about 60 seconds, with no possible way to recover. On MY system, with no junky ass systemd, making this error harms nothing at all and can be easily fixed.

The people who talk about "buggy, hacky" shell scripts appear to be some of the same type of people who shrink in horror from the idea of compiling their own kernel, or working at the command line. (i.e. not really "hackers" at all.) There is nothing at all wrong with using shell scripts for startup. It is in fact the simplest, and IMO most elegant way of doing the job, and no it isn't buggy or hacky in the least. The file system is the database and unit file and the already existing shell is the interpreter.

My system starts much more quickly than Ubuntu and is much faster and more responsive in daily use also, so the "startup time" excuse is a myth, and practically all of the other contrived examples people use to justify the use of systemd can be done BETTER using shell scripts in conjunction with small, light weight, single purpose utilities built the UNIX WAY.

It's "just an INI file" but you would have to understand what the thing that's interpreting does. All the stuff that the OP described as a positive - dependencies, auto-restarts, socket activation - somewhere there's a codebase that's implementing all that, and you can't just understand your "config file", you have to understand what that codebase is actually doing with all of its concepts. Elsewhere in this thread someone writes about how great it is that systemd is using a cgroup namespace to keep track of each process instead of a PID, and maybe that is great, but it's yet another new concept that you have to understand to understand how any of this works. Etc.

You could say that a shell script is a config file for bash, and you have to understand bash to understand what it's doing. But a shell is both simpler than systemd, and something that anyone working with Linux already understands.

The equivalent comparison with init scripts would be all the documentation and complexity of every program invoked by the init scripts, not just by sysvinit or rc's documentation and complexity directly. systemd just has most of that built in. And if you're using socket units, the order of what order to start things is essentially outsourced to the kernel, so that's a bit of a simplification.

Try building and maintaining a linux distro without systemd, especially for a large organization that needs to write their own init scripts. And especially when a large number of the devs in that org aren't shell experts, or don't understand the difference between /bin/sh and /bin/bash. And so on.

Here's another example: https://lwn.net/Articles/701549/ before systemd, for complex NFS setups, the sysadmin _had_ to write the init scripts per-site or per-machine. With the solution in the article (systemd generators) one set of unit files shipped by the distro solves the problem for over 99% of users, including most of the aforementioned complex setups.

How dare a system have "checks notes" have too much documentation describing how it works.

FreeBSD has a lot of documentation, which is something people like about it.

I think it actually shows a problem, which is that BSD is designed for all your machines to be special snowflakes with individual names, edited config files, etc instead of being mass managed declaratively. So you need to know how to do everything because you’re the one doing it.

Our research company hosts 15 PB of data on what we call Single System Imaged FreeBSD with ZFS. All systems pull the complete OS from one managed rsync repo during production hours. Doing this for ten years, never ever any problems. Config files are included using the hostname to differentiate between servers. Adding servers doesn't add manual labor, it's the borg type of setup which handles it all.

This is nonsense. Please educate yourself a bit on systems automation in general if you think this is the case.

Is there an automation for "before updating ports, you need to read every single entry in UPDATING in case one of them has a command you need to run after"?

Why is there a chapter on custom kernels under "common tasks" that assumes you're going to have a C compiler and kernel source on your machine and want to installkernel on that same machine?

The unsaid thing here is Linux is largely not used by sysadmin/unix types. Devops has driven this bloat so that people new to the field can just not have to learn any fundamentals about the OS they're building their tools on. For rapid "move fast and break things" VC nonsense, this is a great match. For efficiency, correctness, and long-term maintainability and security, it's a nightmare.

But they only provide fixed functionality, while shell scripts allow for practically unlimited customization.

As for 500 lines - take a look at proper rc scripts, eg the ones in FreeBSD. They are mostly declarative; it’s nothing like Linux’ sysv scripts, which were in some ways already obsolete when first introduced (runlevels? In ‘90s, seriously?)

If you need extra customization capabilities, just run a shell script via the ExecStart= parameter and boom, you have all the power of systemd and the shell combined.

You can even do one better since systemd can natively run rc scripts. If you're on a systemd based distro peak at /etc/init.d. You can even manage services with /etc/init.d and the service command.

The amount of effort systemd went through to make existing software work is genuinely heroic.

Yeah, this conversation seems a bit like people arguing past each other. But it's a result of the fact that the story on Linux was stuck for so long (e.g., sysvinit on Debian, Upstart with some sharp edged hacks on Ubuntu). Systemd as the solution seems to have sucked out all the air out of the room: either it's great and people are idiots, or it's the worst thing on the planet and people using it are sheep.

Yes. Exactly.

But they only provide fixed functionality, while shell scripts allow for practically unlimited customization.

This is the exact opposite of a good thing.

> But they only provide fixed functionality, while shell scripts allow for practically unlimited customization.

Why is unlimited customization a good thing in the context of a system init?

For the same reason it’s a good thing in other contexts. It’s the main reason Unix got popular - because it can be made to fit whatever requirement you have.

If your BSD init script is 500 lines long, you've done something horribly wrong.

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