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Comment by rwmj | Hacker News Reader

  Lack of Unix philosophy
  [...]
  Missing rest/gRPC/json API

OK ...

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Those certainly do look a little funny next to each other in the same list, but I think it's fair to argue that it's a situation where one tool is being used in cases that don't really overlap properly and it creates tension on both sides.

Edit after further reflection: Alternatively, perhaps both of those complaints could be summarized as poor ability to interoperate with other tooling, in which case they really do fit together.

Yeah -- I think I was just reciting what I hear folks say a lot. Basically its IPC and a stable interface for clients that is the core of the concern. Thats really what the takeaway is.

But Systemd has IPC and a stable interface for clients, it's "the D-Bus interface of systemd"[1]. I would think that exposing that over http would be a little reckless, but I'm sure one can create a proxy that can do it in a "secure"-ish way.

[1] https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/org.freedes...

There is this:

    systemctl --host=whatever.abc status apache2

It uses ssh and UNIX domain socket forwarding behind the scenes. There's a writeup of how to do this with minimal privs here:

https://sleeplessbeastie.eu/2021/03/03/how-to-manage-systemd...

If you want to speak the protocol without the systemctl program then you can do the same trick. Use an SSH library, connect to the dbus socket and connect to systemd. You do need a dbus library though. They are less common than HTTP stacks.

TIL. I had no idea the systemd team implemented something like this already, it's great info, thank you. :)

>They are less common than HTTP stacks.

libsystemd includes a d-bus library for exactly this reason.

I think those are meant differently.

I don't think "Unix philosophy" means "communicate via streams" in this context. I think it means things like the single responsibility principle. Once we introduce APIs, we can't just chain services together with pipes.

But I agree that this use of "Unix philosophy" is confusing.

That section of the post seemed to be generating a lot of friction. I revised the language a little bit.

I think the original sound-byte I was trying to capture was "do one thing" which in my opinion neither Kubernetes nor Systemd do. To be fair -- neither would Aurae. So I just scrapped the entire comment.

I wasn't trying to nitpick systemd as much as I was trying to draw attention to the fact that it does in fact -- get nit picked -- and often unnecessarily.

Plus systemd isn't UNIX, but going with Plan 9 concepts is now UNIX?

Yeah, right.

Plan 9 was designed as an advancement on UNIX, where 100% of everything is a file.

so, I say yes

Except the small detail it isn't POSIX, and the C compiler is somehow special in its ways.

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