/rant
They made binary format THAT DON'T HAVE ANY FUCKING PROPER INDEXING. It might have actual indexing, who the fuck knows, but it don't have any useful one
They could literally just drop in SQLite there and now your entire's system's logs have power of being queried via SQL which would be amazing and easy to use with countless tools that can be used with SQLite but NO, (probably) Lennart wanted to have some fun writing shitty binary format coz of his chronic NIH.
strace systemctl status 2>&1 |grep /var/log/journal |wc -l
71
systemctl status tinc
journalctl -a -e -n10 -u tinc |cat
-- No entries --
I can literally grep a bunch of text files faster than it can look thru it's "efficient" binary logs. But hey if you waste RAM to cache every journal file on your machine in RAM instead of, dunno, actually useful stuff, those commands are fast...
It's an abomination and affront to good engineering. Which is shame coz I like many of the other parts.
/endrant
Systemd is 13 years old.
As far as I'm concerned, the complains against churn run out after the project is old enough to drink. Especially if it's not just well adopted, but by far the most popular option.
In general, having open source but being afraid to change it sounds like hell to me. I personally believe in Linux & open source because it lets us keep improving & iterating & changing. Open source embodies the soft in software, and is the best vector computing society has for bringing light & clarity to a confusing but powerful man-made microverse.
This 254 release is amazing, just so much stuff. Utterly unreadably long but posted some favs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36516792
Chin up, man! Or best of luck over in openbsd land.
I still don't like it.
The binary interface to logs is a good example, not only for the popular dislike for needing to run a binary to view the log, but also, central to my dislike, is the issue with the "init" system being in charge of logging at all.
systemd if far far beyond an "init" system, it is striving to be the "kernel" of user space, in charge of all system functions that are not in the kernel.
This isn't feature creep, it's by design. Is the "init" system in charge of network name resolution? What about making fundamental configuration setting to the OS? Another example of the binary required to access logs, is any change to a non-running root filesystem. If you've configured a rootfs for a machine other than the one you're doing this work on (maybe a different CPU architecture, or simply a rootfs for another machine) you're going to run into complications. Same situation when in a chroot. If the rootfs you're configuring, isn't the one currently active, those binary executables are going to havee trouble.
As soon as we have systemd-packagemanagerd, there will be 0 difference between systemd based distributions. Everyone will simply put the kernel together w/ systemd for a complete operating system. This was Red Hat's intention, now IBM's intention.
I use linux for my work, both in embedded targets and in my development workstation. For many years I've simply copied my home dir to new computers and moved on. The next time I configure a workstation from scratch, I'm going to voidlinux. runit, based on The DJB Way, is much closer to my ideal...
Having one interface to them is useful.
i respect the BSD hacker style, minimal init ethos.
But man is it handy to have declarative sandboxing in service files.
`loginctl` as a standard for listing, locking, killing user sessions.
`machinectl` as a container / virtual machine manager.
And --host / --machine to remote all of the above.
Is KDE “longing for world domination” because they have multiple projects as well?
over which part of linux's history do you feel this happened?
during the years long libc migrations? during the thread wars?
which linux-based OS have you used for a couple of decades that hasn't had large changes but has managed to continue to exist? slackware?