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Comment by chimeracoder | Hacker News Reader

> I will ask members of the Ubuntu community to help to implement this decision efficiently, bringing systemd into both Debian and Ubuntu safely and expeditiously.

Well, this was a pleasant surprise.

I honestly thought that Ubuntu would continue to use Upstart regardless of what Debian decided. It'd have been a monumental amount of work to take on, but on the other hand, there's already been a lot of NIH-syndrome in Ubuntu-land for a while (Upstart, Mir, Unity, etc.)

Ubuntu's been slowly moving in the direction of becoming a "silo", spearate from other Linux distributions for a while now (a direction I dislike). If Ubuntu had decided to double-down on Upstart against the tide, that would have been the final nail in the coffin for them (in my books - they'd still find success for at least a while no matter what they did).

EDIT: Upstart may actually not be a great example of NIH, but Mir certainly is.

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> but on the other hand, there's already been a lot of NIH-syndrome in Ubuntu-land for a while (Upstart...

Upstart is certainly not an example of NIH-syndrome. At the time that upstart was written, nothing else existed that solved the problems that it did. systemd did not exist at the time. Ubuntu led the way here, and it is unfair to claim otherwise.

launchd existed — albeit was decided against in large part down to licensing concerns (it was, at the time, only available under the Apple Public Source License 2.0 (APSL)), though a couple of months later it was re-licensed under the Apache License 2.0 to alleviate such concerns. OpenSolaris's SMF was considered too. AIUI both were purely decided against on licensing grounds, although they met the technical requirements.

Had launchd already been available under the Apache License 2.0 at the time, who knows, it might now be well-established on Linux. (AIUI, GPL compatibility is not an issue here — the problem is more the APSL isn't compatible with, e.g., the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) and hence would never be adopted by the Linux community at large.)

I'm assuming the reality that systemd's API will eventually wheedle its way into most other Debian components made the decision for him. Swapping out Gnome for Unity is a lot easier for someone downstream of Debian than continuing to maintain Upstart in the face of Systemd will be.

One difference is that the init system is not especially user facing.

(It can be, but that means it isn't working very well)

It is for sysadmins. And those are probably Canonical's biggest source of income.

Not really. We're mainly concerned that the interface is consistent.

service ssh restart works fine but that was fine in sysvinit as well..

for some value of fine.

  service my_service restart

required writing 100+ shell scripts, each of which was error prone and difficult.

But also 100% not my problem :)

If one of those scripts forgets to kill a process's children (because the process itself was supposed to handle that), and a server ends up with a bazillion orphaned processes, then it could well become your problem!

This happened to me once. Never again, damn it.

What stopped you from spawning the daemon in a cgroup?

I didn't know about them at the time, and I wasn't the one who wrote the script that spawned it.

It matters to sysadmins and programmers.

I agree with what you said about Ubuntu NIH syndrome.

If their alternatives were better, or at least equivalent, it would not be so bad. But these NIH projects typically only have Canonical (and some Ubuntu) people working on them.

Go to Launchpad bugs and look through open and closed tickets. The NIH projects often cause Ubuntu user problems, and they just lay there and no one fixes them. If Debian, Red Hat, fd.o etc. had other distros depending on things, there would be a lot of people around to fix problems. When Ubuntu does it's own version, they are usually the people who have to fix problems.

unity also predates gnome-shell, I might add.

It does not predate gnome-shell. They were first to call it stable, while GNOME shell was way more stable when we called it stable. You should check the first commits, not when something is released as 1.0. The latter is up to the maintainer and you can do that at any time (and in some cases: never).

Well, the first UNR launcher commit is from 2008-04-16, the first gnome-shell commit is from 2008-10-31. It's pretty close.

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