Comment by SubjectToChange | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SubjectToChange | Hacker News Reader

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SubjectToChange

People seem to not appreciate that Lennart Poettering managed to get systemd from concept to shipping in RHEL 7 in under four years. At that point I'm not even sure anyone at Red Hat had even asked for it, they had already transitioned to Upstart for RHEL 6 after all. Whatever your opinion of Poettering may be, you have to admit that he has tenacity.

So it went heavily imposed almost everywhere even when a quite big chunk of the Linux community deeply disagreed about the imposition.

There is a substantial selection bias in the complaints towards systemd. At the very least it seems that Red Hat's customers didn't have a problem with it. For most Linux users, it was a minor change, but for distro maintainers it was a massive relief[1].

Again, Lennart Poettering actually took the initiative to develop systemd and get it adopted. By comparison, detractors of systemd did not develop a competitive alternative. Thus, it's hardly a surprise that systemd ended up steamrolling the competition. Ultimately systemd is what users deserve because no person or company bothered to make something better.

[1]: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1149530#p1149530

As it happens way too commonly, the loudest in OSS communities are ones that have zero stake in building or maintaining the projects they criticize. It's easy to just rant if everyone else has to pick up the extrenalities.

Your comment can be read as either for or against systemd.

I'm leaning that it's against systemd but I'm not completely sure. :)

I allow you to interpret it in a way that makes your day better :D

The reality of my situation is my job frequently involves meeting people where they are - and most people are on systemd. Issues with systemd have caused and continue to cause me significant headaches - sometimes they are one-off but major events, sometimes they are recurring frustrations because of specific design decisions. I've included a list with some examples of both elsewhere in these comments.

I don't want to build a competitor to systemd because I fundamentally disagree with the design philosophy that has led to the proliferation of a huge number of systemd-* replacements for other things that already worked fine for all of my use cases. For situations where I have complete control over the infrastructure and don't need to worry about junior engineers that only have experience in the systemd ecosystem, I don't run it, and my life is lower stress because of it. I don't even particularly care much about the init portion of it, though a lot of the improvements are things that I don't really care about, like boot time - if I'm in a situation where a server's boot time has some impact on our overall uptime, etc., then things have gone wrong in a very big way - but if it was just a new init system, I'd have minimal complaints.

But in general, it's one of the reasons that I have been glad to shift my professional focus away from being very specific to the Linux and compute side of things to broader cloud platforms, etc.

So far most of the complaints about systems are really all about the fact that there is no real competitor to systemd. The argument that systemd is difficult to replace says more about the state of the rest of Linux user land, than it says about systemd, since most of the benefits of systemd are easy to replicate.

Writing another init system isn't exactly something most people would want to spend years of their life on. At best, it'd take a few years to reach some limited parity with where systemd is today. Furthermore, most of the systemd detractors fundamentally object the philosophy of systemd. So how can they meaningfully innovate over upstart and/or runit? It's either developing systemd-lite or a more elaborate ball of scripts. Even then, there is the issue of convincing distributions to adapt your new init system.

The reality is that systemd arrived at a time when Linux distributions were dying to move off of sysvinit. Poettering struck when the metal was hot and he delivered a comprehensive tool that greatly reduced the burden on maintainers. Sure, nothing lasts forever, but it will be many years (if not decades) before systemd is slated for replacement.

If you are trying to convince me that systemd happened out of the creativity of Mr. Poettering and Red Hat just followed him... well I have to say I don't believe that. But anyway, for me it really doesn't matter. It's the beauty of free software.

As strange as it might sound, that’s basically what happened.

I mean, let’s assume that Red Hat leadership initiated the systemd project, then we are immediately confronted by a number of problems. First of all, if Red Hat planned to ship systemd with the launch of RHEL 7 in 2014, then why did development on systemd only begin in early 2010? It seems rather irresponsible to intentionally delay development of the new init system for your flagship product, particularly when you’ll be supporting it for the next 15+ years.

Second of all, why would Red Hat hand the systemd project to Lennart Poettering, a developer who was primarily responsible for PulseAudio? Moreover, Poettering was already notorious for being an outspoken member of the Linux community. So why would Red Hat management go so far out of their way to choose such a divisive figure lead their project?

Also, why would Red Hat management seek to imitate launchd of all things? Why not SMF or some other “enterprise” solution instead?

Last of all, upstart development was primarily funded by Canonical and it had proven itself on RHEL 6. Therefore, replacing upstart with systemd meant shifting the maintenance burden back onto Red Hat in one of the very few areas it could actually save on it.

Now, if you still have your doubts than here it is from the man himself: https://web.archive.org/web/20181108025744/https://thenewsta...

Again, what Poettering accomplished with systemd is astounding.

There is a lot to hate about systemd, but in the end anything like it is very hard and few people have the time/energy to attempt something.

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