New Group Calls For Boycotting Systemd

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2014-09-08 at 08:43 +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:

> > > Anyway, systemd now does the following which it didn't do in F15:
> > > 
> > >  - has its own network configuration system
> > 
> > ...which we don't use.
> 
> So why is the tool there?

Well, because it's part of upstream systemd? We ship *lots* of code we
don't use by default, this is hardly unusual.

> > >  - has a way to control firmware boot settings
> > >  - intercepts coredumps
> > 
> > not on Fedora, abrt does that.
> 
> It does on my F22 machine:
> 
>   $ cat /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern
>   |/usr/lib/systemd/systemd-coredump %p %u %g %s %t %e
> 
> I haven't done anything in particular that enables this, but it's
> possibly because abrt is not installed on this headless system.

Yeah, I should say 'not in our default configuration'. I noticed
yesterday it picked up a crash in python during anaconda boot. I don't
actually know what the point of this mechanism is, but hey, I still got
the coredump file out, so...no problem? I dunno.

> > >  - has the journal
> > 
> > was *extensively* discussed and argued about when it landed and whenever
> > changes were made to its behaviour (see list archives).
> > 
> > >  - has tools for setting the system time and timezone, and locale
> > 
> > Sure. They're useful.
> 
> They also don't work unless a daemon is running, meaning you can't
> run them in a chrooted filesystem.

Then use a different mechanism, the way these tools actually work and
the config files they're backed by are documented.

> > >  - has a firstboot mechanism
> > 
> > Where? In any case, Fedora doesn't use it.
> 
> systemd-firstboot(1) on F22.

Hum, I don't see it on F21. I dunno, can't say anything about it.

> > >  - detects virtualization (long story here, but a very bad idea to
> > >    encourage programs to do this)
> > 
> > I don't believe any Fedora units use this ability. It's there for people
> > who want to use it.
> 
> At least open-vm-tools uses it (it shouldn't).
> 
> > >  - has a program for comparing /etc configurations
> > >  - has its own version of the FHS and a tool for managing it
> > 
> > Erm. What?
> 
> systemd-delta(1)

OK, so it's a tool that does something useful. What's your issue with
it?

> file-hierarchy(7)

Oh, yeah. That's kind of documentation-after-the-fact, as I see it. FHS
has moved painfully slowly lately, and there are cases where systemd
just had to go ahead and *do* something that isn't covered by FHS, so it
picked an approach. the man page documents those cases and the approach
systemd took.

Distributions already extend far beyond FHS (and sometimes disregard it)
in quite a lot of other ways, so I'm not sure this is a problem. I worry
more about cases where systemd actively conflicts with things that are
explicitly specified in FHS, but even that isn't always *necessarily*
wrong.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net