[CentOS] Cemtos 7 : Systemd alternatives ?

Lamar Owen lowen at pari.edu
Wed Jul 9 20:07:25 UTC 2014


On 07/09/2014 03:20 PM, Les Mikesell wrote:
> No, that is exactly my point. Back then the griping by affected active 
> users happened in more or less real time compared to the changes being 
> done. Now fedora goes off on its own merry way for years before its 
> breakage comes back to haunt the people that wanted stability.

Real-time?  Since when?  The development direction was already pretty 
much done by the time the public betas were released and the griping 
began.  Even by the time of the private betas the development direction 
on several of the releases was already pretty much set in stone.  I only 
had a bit of input for PostgreSQL because I was maintaining the upstream 
RPM package at the time; but I had no pre-beta access to whatever was in 
the beehive queue at the time.

With fedora, on the other hand, you already know that what is going in 
the next version of EL is going to be previewed in Fedora and you are 
absolutely free to follow the Fedora lists and get involved in the 
actual process, rather than being fed an already mostly-baked beta every 
so often.  If you don't follow the Fedora lists and get involved, well, 
you get what you pay for, I guess.  I don't currently follow the Fedora 
lists, incidentally, but I do track the features that are being 
implemented.  We already had Upstart, and the move from Upstart to 
systemd is not that big (at least in my opinion), so it's not something 
that got me up in arms.  Plain text non-XML configs that can be on a 
non-executable filesystem and lots of really nice options in the unit 
configs really change the way you think of system startup.  It is a 
change; I've not decided whether I think is a good change or not; most 
of the big Linux distributions have decided that it is a good change.

In a quick google, I found what I thought to be a pretty clearly written 
article (from 2012) on systemd's strong points from the point of view of 
a server admin: 
http://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/SystemdRight?showcomments

If it can really deliver this, particularly the feature of 
sysadmin-modified units all being in one place, yeah, looks like a good 
thing.  And there will be plenty of eyes on it.  Most of the articles 
looking at systemd's weak points (and there are several) aren't written 
in nearly as level a fashion as the above.  Lots of vitriol to go 
around, unfortunately.


> ...
> Don't think people running a bunch of RH5 servers really cared about X
> or desktops at all...

You missed my Red Baron comment, didn't you?  I ran Red Hat Linux 4.1 as 
a desktop, and once Mandrake 5.3 was out I went completely Linux as my 
primary work and personal desktop.  I figured if I was going to run it 
as a server I needed to 'dogfood' things and really rely on it for daily 
work.  And my employer agreed.

The days StarOffice became OpenOffice.org and then when OO.o 1.0 wound 
its way into RHL were very good days for this desktop Linux user.

...

> Yes, but on the other hand, people still pay large sums of money for
> other operating systems.  And there are some reasons for that.
>
Many of which are not technical.



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