Re: [gentoo-amd64] Re: Systemd migration: opinion and questions

[Marc Joliet]

Am Thu, 21 May 2015 09:36:28 +0000 (UTC)
schrieb Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@×××.net>:

> Rich Freeman posted on Wed, 20 May 2015 07:22:39 -0400 as excerpted:
[...]
> So while systemd's failure to have a decent stable/unstable releases
> policy, as well as the continued featuritis, continues to bother me,
> because gentoo /does/ keep older versions around for awhile (and because
> being gentoo, if old versions are removed from the tree, I can always
> dredge the old version from the installed package database or from my
> binpkgs, and put it in my overlay), it's not the problem it might
> otherwise be.  In fact, this whole incident actually supports that...
> because it's gentoo, I actually /have/ 218 (and older versions) still
> available to me, despite the fact that 219 is current-latest ~arch.
>
> So in reality systemd hasn't been any worse than openrc was for me, and
> in a number of ways (including documented config, real speed, cross-
> distro standardization so google's more effective, /and/ not signficantly
> more and possibly less show-stopping bugs than openrc), it has actually
> been better, /despite/ the lack of a coherent stable/unstable release
> plan.

I agree, though I've only used two systemd releases till now (216 and 218).

[...] 
> 2) (larger philosophical/practical context):  Back in 2001/2002 when I
> got serious about and switched to Linux, I read a couple books, but I
> actually got my practical hands-on shell experience by rewriting several
> of the Mandrake init-scripts, including the core sysinitrc (or whatever
> it was called, that was nearly a decade and a half again, after all!).
>
> I can't believe I was the only one.
>
> As a result, one of the nagging fears I have about systemd, despite all
> the improvements I believe it does bring, is that this early gateway to
> practical shell knowledge and experience is literally disappearing before
> our eyes, and people trying to become Linux CLI/shell literate today are
> going to have a much harder time than people of my Linux generation did,
> because there's far less shell scripting actually available for them to
> work on, and it's far less prominently placed, making it much harder to
> simply stumble upon, as I basically did.

I don't know... I learned basically all of my shell scripting from trying to
solve problems I was seeing and simply because I wanted to try out something.
I didn't touch init scripts until I had to (for work), and by then OpenRC
supported its own declarative style (see openrc-run(8)), so the amount of
shell *scripting* involved was minimal (and then we switched that computer to
Fedora, and hence to systemd).

Anyway, it seems to me that "scratching your own itch" was the more basic
motivation you had for learning shell scripting via init scripts.

> Between that, and the transparency of a shell-based system init that
> they're losing as well, today's newbies may well find it far harder to
> get in as deeply, as quickly, as I did, and the wonders of system bootup
> may as a result remain as practically opaque to them as an MS Windows
> boot.

I would argue that in this case people at least have the source code.  But more
importantly, the *principal* of what happens is still not very different:
commands get executed with particular arguments and a particular environment.
For me, personally, the latter is the least transparent, I suppose, but then
again, "systemd show" shows you all the properties of a unit, which (in
combination with the systemd documentation) gives you pretty much all of the
information you need to learn what *exactly* is going on.

(Of course, this is just me trying to show an alternative view point, not
trying to make it look like this isn't a potential issue, even though from my
perspective it isn't.)

[...]

-- 
Marc Joliet
--
"People who think they know everything really annoy those of us who know we
don't" - Bjarne Stroustrup