[CentOS] OT: systemd Poll - So Long, and Thanks for All the fish.

Mon Apr 17 21:13:02 UTC 2017
Warren Young <warren at etr-usa.com>

On Apr 15, 2017, at 12:19 AM, Anthony K <akcentos at anroet.com> wrote:
> 
> Also, there's a lot of people moving to FreeBSD - but it appears that the grass isn't greener there either as they are now trialling OpenRC.

You appear to have misunderstood my post.

First, TrueOS is not FreeBSD.  TrueOS is to FreeBSD as Ubuntu is to Debian, kinda-sorta.  Some of the things the TrueOS people do make their way back into FreeBSD, but TrueOS largely exists for those who want an easier desktop experience than stock FreeBSD or want a semi-supported bleeding-edge distribution of FreeBSD.

Now that TrueOS is based on the CURRENT (i.e. bleeding-edge) branch of FreeBSD development, TrueOS also serves a pioneer role for FreeBSD: those being the guys with all the arrows in their backs.

Because of that, TrueOS’s adoption of OpenRC doesn’t mean FreeBSD will follow suit.  Maybe they will, maybe they won’t.

Second, it’s not a “trial”.  It was announced, and then suddenly between two versions BSD rc was switched to OpenRC.  No “are you sure,” no “here are the consequences,” no “sorry, what you’re doing here is incompatible.”  Just boom, best-effort automatic conversion; if it breaks, you get to keep both pieces.

(Kinda makes you smile when you remember all the threads from those who found out that RHEL family OSes can’t self-upgrade between major versions.  Suddenly it’s looking like a feature.  Imagine if the EL6 to EL7 transition happened the same way.)

FreeBSD proper splits the difference between these two upgrade methods.  You have to explicitly opt into minor version upgrades, and automatic major version upgrades are possible but always offered with plenty of warnings and migration advice.

If you want a FreeBSD-specific lesson from this, it would be “don't run 12.0-CURRENT on critical servers.”

Also, I’ll remind the list that one of the *prior* times the systemd topic came up, I was the one reminding people that most of our jobs summarize as “Cope with change.”