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Comment by noplacelikehome | Hacker News Reader

libsystem is such a bizarre abstraction covering far too much surface area. The name alone is a code smell. Why is the same library used for both internal service management and for services implementing on-demand launches and notifications?

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I like parts of systemd very much: units and their sandboxing/isolation/chroot of processes.

Many other parts are terrible beyond measure: journald for example.

I think the concept of on-demand processes managed by the end manager is a good idea, but systemd is strong arming the services into accepting its philosophy.

What's wrong with journald? I do not know much about it, aside from having to use journalctl to view logs occasionally.

Logs being stored in binary is the main problem, I think.

You can of course copy them into whatever format you want, systemd has support for syslog style export.

Versus the logical dmesg|grep {what you are looking for} or tail -n 30 /var/log/messages.

Tell me you never tried

  journalctl | grep {term}

without telling anything.

Also you are probably never worked with a localised distros. Go try your luck at least on a non-Latin one.

you can just run journalctl -g {term} too lol

That is the systemd way, and what many of us have pointed out for years as a major risk of the approach.

I have never seen anybody point to it as a security risk before this happened. Would be happy to see a reference of somebody saying that prior to the xz event

Report is that shortly before the hole was reported, a PR had been posted requesting to remove the dependency on xz.

This reads as though your objection is to the scope of systemd rather than its implementation detail, which isn’t where my objection lies.

I have nothing against the service management stack also addressing common principles like logging and on-demand starts a la inetd, but the notion that applications should link against a component of the service manager which is also used by the service manager boggles my tiny mind.

libsystemd is not being used by systemd itself.

> Why is the same library used for both internal service management and for services implementing on-demand launches and notifications?

Poettering was a Microsoft fan. I guess he designed SystemD like svchost.

and the fact that it worked and still working means that he was right, also systemd was already fixing the huge dependecies for a while, this only accelerated the process

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