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Comment by krschultz | Hacker News Reader

That's a feature not a bug.

The first sentence on the systemd project overview is:

systemd is a suite of basic building blocks for a Linux system.

After describing the init system it goes on to say:

Other parts include a logging daemon, utilities to control basic system configuration like the hostname, date, locale, maintain a list of logged-in users and running containers and virtual machines, system accounts, runtime directories and settings, and daemons to manage simple network configuration, network time synchronization, log forwarding, and name resolution.

systemd is intentionally a much bigger project than just the systemd init system.

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Then why does it seem like every Debian debate compared it (favorably) to upstart or sysvinit?

This is what annoys me about that debate. Systemd arguably _is_ a better init system. But no one asked for a new logger, network config, time daemon, cron, etc.

Now you're saying that's always been the intention? Perhaps, but this was not emphasized by the systemd team.

I don't know if that was always the intention. I don't know the original authors of systemd personally. The original announcement blog post definitely does not make any claims to be more than just an init system[1].

That said, at one point the Apache Foundation was just about a web server and the GNU project was just about a compiler.

I'm not arguing for or against systemd here, I'm just saying that the days of thinking about systemd as just an init system are over. They're building an entire framework for a Linux distro. You can agree or disagree with that, but talking about systemd today as an init system that has sprawled is obfuscating the situation. The systemd maintainers today are clearly trying to go beyond just an init system.

[1] http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html

>the GNU project was just about a compiler

The acronym itself is actually a big hint that this is incorrect.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/net.unix-wizards/8twfR...

>To begin with, GNU will be a kernel plus all the utilities needed to

>write and run C programs: editor, shell, C compiler, linker,

>assembler, and a few other things.

systemd does logging, network config, time daemon, cron, etc better than the alternatives btw.

In the case of the time daemon, that does not actually seem to be the case. It appears to be a far less rigorous approach than that used by ntpd - basically it looks to be similar to running ntpdate in a loop.

Seems to be par of the course for systemd sub projects.

Their dhcp client violates various security best practices in the name of speed (the whole thing was reminiscent of the Apple debacle related to iOS wifi).

And their DNS client quietly grew a cache susceptible to poisoning. A problem known about and solved for a decade in DNS circles.

I'd be in "eat my hat" territory if systemd was a better logger than syslog-ng.

>Then why does it seem like every Debian debate compared it (favorably) to upstart

The debian technical committee vote on upstart vs systemd was split 50:50.

I think the tight coupling of programs is the main reason that systemd causes so much controversy. If it were just an init system, even an opinionated one, there wouldn't be so many people who cared.

Exactly. I didn't hear about it until i ran into a notice that consolekit was depreciated, and getting pointed to logind. And logind happened to be tightly coupled to systemd-as-pid1.

> systemd is a suite of basic building blocks for a Linux system.

Well, that's a stretch really. systemd is more like tightly coupled systems eating up more and more services and rewriting them systemd way. Things that do look like blocks (udev, journal, logind) are "take systemd way, or nothing".

Uselessd is a basic building block.

uselessd is a dead project.

I don't think that's relevant. It's still an example of what a basic block is and that systemd could be split up.

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