badgersandjam

The two are related.

People are shipping production operating systems with systemd that is chock full of bugs.

An all consuming tentacle monster like systemd is fine if you want to dogfood it but to throw at paying customers and/or supporters of your distribution is a little off key.

The hardware is known good on CentOS 6.5. In fact it was high end HP kit that we pulled out of production.

Yes there were other mentions of it with notes to it being fixed in a later systemd drop, which we can't deploy because RH/CentOS don't ship it. I think one of our guys raised a case with RH but I was dragged off onto something else then.

That's really not a terrible idea actually. I switch back and forth a lot between the Windows and the Unixy ecosystems and by far the best end user experience, tailored[1] developer experience and (I'm going to get slated for this), mobile experience is on Windows by far.

[1] tailored as in platform specific. For cross platform stuff, it's not so good.

10 years in EE (embedded systems, defense industry), then 15 in what we now call devops/architecture. Experience is fine. I have no problems being arrogant about that. I've fallen down a lot more holes than a lot of people and know what I'm talking about.

When I say tested properly, I mean tested completely. If you miss an entire functional unit of the software and a client reports it as broken, its pretty obvious what the problem is.

Our senior software guys sat down for the other four hours and presented all our findings together and cumulatively said "we're not supporting that shit; we can't trust it".

Regarding #4, it's plain to see that RHEl was released with a broken systemd implementation due to deadline...

I had no problems the second time as well.

Unfortunately when the first and second time differ even though identical (recorded) steps were performed, one has to ask the question: why and can I trust it?

That sounds like an excuse which I don't accept. I have a formal engineering background and whilst you're fundamentally right, engineering is based upon cumulative experience gained. We have a hell of a lot of experience as a society of writing software that works and is of merchantable quality.

What the general state of affairs shows is the following traits:

1) There is no thought and research going into the design of a piece of software. Ergo, we do not learn from past mistakes.

2) There are isolated individuals writing vast swathes of software which are trusted unconditionally. Ergo, we do not learn the benefit of multiple eyes on a problem, review and discussion.

3) We assume that software is correct from one person's viewpoint and opinion. Ergo, we do not test software properly nor cover those tests with objectives.

4) We work to deadlines, not quality objectives. Ergo, we trade quality for tolerance from others.

In this case someone came along and didn't think about the problem, didn't work with others, assumed they were unconditionally correct and chose tolerance over quality.

To use your analogy, they're now selling stainless steel lightning rods (poor conductivity), are the only vendor of them, are a vocal marketing front and houses are catching fire everywhere.

Or more specifically, in one example, the entire process was above and from the author to the distributor, no one even noticed that loginctl doesn't work properly.

This bugzilla query against RHEL 7.0 systemd says otherwise:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/buglist.cgi?bug_status=NEW&bug_s...

A lot of the bug descriptions are quite scarily bad when you consider them in context such as "various loginctl commands not working" etc.

Actually the answer is to be slightly more conservative with the approach. No one has to pick up systemd now for example. Leave it a year and see where it is. The technical merits will be obvious and the technical problems will also be.

Moving all the chess pieces at once, which is what is happening is not productive, professional or a sign of experience.

They are individually I agree, but as a group of people it's not such a good story. It's quite dysfunctional from what I've seen.

I disagree.

There are very few heterogenic systems in the enterprise. That is an objective, but the main thing is that we deliver what we're paid to deliver by choosing an appropriate platform. We have Solaris, zSeries, Linux and Windows. We just got rid of AIX.

As for minor differences, FreeBSD has a lot of much bigger wins than people realise at first glimpse. The differences are far from minor. For example:

ZFS, dtrace, rctl, a scary good IP stack, virtio support, documentation that doesn't suck, a POSIX base, LLVM/clang, a MAC framework that doesn't suck, OpenBSM, CARP and a pile more. Oh plus an automated deployment story that is pretty tidy.

Sure we can replicate some of these on CentOS 7 for example with similar tech but the above are a million times more cohesive.

No it's not just one data point. This is the final straw to use the old phrase. After a few years of serious problems, our most recent being CIFS VFS problems causing panics and mounts locking up on CentOS 6.5, hard locks on RH certified hardware, power management hell and so much incredible churn with no progress and the sudden "fuck POSIX" approach, it paints a really bad picture of the current state of things.

There is a distinct lack of engineering prowess and quality control. It originates at the core GNU + kernel + freedesktop teams and waterfalls down through the distribution houses.

That's the problem and it's endemic within Linux.

Many large decisions have been made by idiots, badly. Blindly accepting consensus as a rational choice without a counterpoint had caused many years of suffering for the human race from wars to bad science to bad medicine.

Whilst I agree that the blog is probably hocum, there's nothing wrong with critical thinking.

Absolutely no idea. It just went away spontaneously which is even more worrying as that suggests the system is non-deterministic.

I don't have the error on my phone which I'm on at the moment but it threw a dbus error with no debug info.

I had no opinion on systemd until yesterday. In fact I had a glace or two at the code and it's pretty clean and I liked the rough objectives laid out.

I installed CentOS 7 on a machine last night that we're replacing CentOS 6 on and was poked in the face with timedatectl and dbus problems for an entire hour, some of which were intermittent. Debugging these issues is a horrific pain. I lost 4 hours on it. I've never lost that much time on a system function before. This is not what I expected and there is no way I could possibly introduce that to our production environment.

I think that might why people are slightly sensitive to it.

Yes you're exactly right, but replacing something with something less stable, more complicated and more difficult to debug isn't a rational or good engineering. I'm sure many people will be fed up with systemd much quicker than what was already there.

Not impressed with a community which pushes this as stable, quality software. Voting with my feet: FreeBSD is being trialled instead. WhatsApp throwing a million dollars at it draws a lot of valuable attention and puts it in the business's mindset.

Choice is as much of a valuable aspect of open source too...

I get junk mail for Mr qweqwe asdasd a lot as confirmation of your point :)

It pays the bills because it solves problems.

I run windows on a 4 year old thinkpad. It's 8.1 on an i5. It goes like lightning and the battery lasts twice as long as Ubuntu does on the same kit even after powertop has been frigged with.

Also my wife's android handset has 25% more battery capacity than my Lumia 630 and lasts half as long.

YMMV but what you state is not factual and merely a slashdot-esque troll.

Yeah I know. The A0 with windows server is painful. If I got an A1 for £30 I'd break even on renting a dedicated box. That's the big pain.

I get bugger all Azure credits with Pro. £35 a month which isn't enough to spin up one VM with 1.75Gb of RAM for a month...

If I grab MAPS sub and VS community I'm well up on cash.

Ah c'mon at least try a bit harder. '''password''' is defined as:

   char password[LINE_MAX];

So that's preventing a buffer overflow and is perfectly fine.

LINE_MAX is a POSIX thing: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/limi...

There's no one putting a silly limit on password length there.

I worked that out in 2 mins flat. Bear in mind I haven't even looked at the systemd source code before.

Edit: you know I've actually read some of that code and it's pretty nice.

To be honest I didn't time it and it wasn't thread safe and I don't have the source any more so I can't answer that. It doesn't do a lot so I imagine it would be relatively cheap.

The function it performed to rebuild the DFA was to create an NFA for the new pattern stream (it worked on char *) and then walk both the existing master NFA and the merge them. Then it was converted from NFA to DFA via dragon book copy and paste algorithm (my discrete math isn't great). Both NFA and DFA were represented as a bunch of C structs tied together by pointers. Then a table generator walked the new DFA and generated a new state table. It was very naive but covered the common case where large parts of the byte stream to be matched were similar.

I've got MacVim up and writing it again. May post it as a Show HN if I get the time to finish it.

This. I wrote something that did this a few years ago. It took n patterns (not regex, simpler) and turned them into one DFA state table with a function ptr stored for each final state. Then it had a tiny runtime. Never thought of using it for route tables however.

Nice idea.

Edit: I did consider rewriting the runtime as a forth style interpreter as well but the time never appeared.

Only because some caching DNS resolvers are broken and keep the referral cached for the TTL of the CNAME record.

Also as I found out, set the TTL on your CNAME very low.

Also this is a PITA if you use the @ entry in your DNS.

This is a confidence builder for migrating my two servers to FreeBSD from Debian. I don't have a problem with systemd from a technical perspective but I do have a big problem with politics getting in the way of progress or forcing hands.

I suspected as much. It doesn't sound like "value for money" which is my concern. There are better scientific objectives than shooting for the moon cold-war style to raise awareness and interest in it. Look how much attention everyone paid to Beagle 2 which had proper scientific objectives, that was until it tragically failed. RIP.

Couldn't agree more with your last point; this country is tragically embroiled in celebrityism.

Considering the absolutely pointless HS2 rail project in the UK is set to cost $27 billion, $780 million is pretty cheap :)

I signed up purely to upvote this :)

On a more serious note, there appears to be zero scientific motivation to do this. It just appears to be a self-set challenge. Am I wrong?