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List:       opensuse
Subject:    Re: [opensuse] systemd
From:       "Brian K. White" <brian () aljex ! com>
Date:       2017-07-17 22:23:39
Message-ID: e40034dd-c00d-d0cb-00bd-1a2c81401534 () aljex ! com
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On 7/14/2017 10:12 PM, Anton Aylward wrote:
> On 14/07/17 08:02 PM, John Andersen wrote:
>> This is just nonsense, showing you don't know the first thing about systemd, or you've never
>> bothered to read the very simple manual.
>
> +1   Or perhaps Brian is emulating a fnord?
>
> its kinda hard to argue with someone who throws up -- as you say -- straw man
> issues, makes claims that are contradicting what has been documented and, even
> with my limited use of systemd, doable and done.   It's sort of like arguing
> with a Conspiracy Theorist who is telling you that the Government has hidden the
> evidence for Christ's Second Coming on a rainy Sunday afternoon at Hyde Park
> corner.  When you ask "which government" you get a lecture, not telling you a
> specific one, or even "All Of Them!", but on how Plato predicted it in the
> suppressed eleventh book, and how this was explained in the movie "Spinal Tap"
> but cut out of the cinema and DVD releases.
>
> If that makes sense to you then I suggest you read Shea & Wilson's
> "Illuminatus!" Trilogy.
>

Yep, me & Linus, just two hopelessly clueless dolts. I have wifi though, 
so whatever the reason was for counting that against Linda for being 
insufficiently "normal", it doesn't apply to me, so, it's almost like it 
was never a valid part of this topic in the first place.

That's kind of a large part of the problem right there. The system is 
not supposed to be dictating to the user how it shall be used. "What??? 
You don't have an initrd???? You are so flagrantly deviant that all bets 
are off and you don't even deserve to be supported." Such "standardized" 
canned systems do have their place, and they are game consoles and 
phones and chromebooks. A general purpose OS loses value when it becomes 
more like chromebook. It gets "better" only from the perspective of 
someone wanting to either use, or support the back end for a chromebook.

init is supposed to be tiny and predictable and dependable. The less the 
black box binary part of it does, the better. This is a general 
pronciple that applies no matter what sort of structure of higher level 
things you want to build on top of it does. It's not because I just 
happen to like it that way better, or because that's the way it was 
yesterday so that's all I can imagine today. It's because yesterday the 
basic truth was recognized, and remains a basic truth today for the same 
reasons. You can neither modify, nor even examine the actual source of 
systemd directly at boot time. You can do so with scripts, and it 
doesn't matter if they are SCO init scripts or freebsd init scripts or 
openrc or even upstart. The exact types of files init reads and in what 
order don't much matter. I don't care if /etc/inittab exists or is 
replaced with something completely different.

You can't do so with the init binary itself, or the kernel, but *those* 
things which can not be helped, and especially in the case of init, at 
least the problem is *minimized*, as an explicit intentional design 
goal, by making the inscrutable/immutable binary part of it small, 
simple, and debugged like crazy for decades and *not* feature-added like 
crazy for decades. All the desired features can perfectly well be added 
elsewhere.

systemd makes fundamental philosophy choice that says "You don't need 
any ultimate fall back ability to handle problems systemd failed to 
handle, because systemd will never fail, and will always allow for every 
possible need you might have, and anything systemd doesn't allow for, 
was invalid and you didn't actually need it or have a valid reason for 
wanting it."

A tiny init that just starts reading a script and goes from there, makes 
no such assumptions, and therefor, is still serving users correctly 30 
years later, who are doing things the original authors never imagined or 
explicitly allowed for. What they imagined, *correctly*, was that they 
can't possibly know what people will ever need to do, and that therefor 
it would be wrong to try in the first place.

init is like having a language. systemd is like having a phrasebook. 
With init, you can still write that phrasebook if you want, but with 
only a phrasebook, you can't create a missing phrase.

-- 
bkw

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