[Cialug] The systemd Init System

[Scott Yates]

Thank you for your replies.

I see the points you are making, and understand why this would be helpful.

One last thought:  This seems like it breaks with the Unix philosophy of
small, chain-able apps that "Do one thing very well".

Maybe this is just a case where that philosophy breaks down?

On Wed, Dec 9, 2015 at 9:38 PM, Jeffrey Ollie <jeff at ocjtech.us> wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 9, 2015 at 4:13 PM, Scott Yates <Scott at yatesframe.com> wrote:
>
> > Specifically, systemd seems to have the idea that all other init systems
> > are broken
>
>
> Yes, in fact they are (IMNSHO).
>
>
> > and they have taken it on themselves to "fix" them.  The idea
> > of a monolithic init system makes me nervous because it throws away 30+
> > years of proven ideas.
> >
>
> Just because we've been limping along with sysvinit doesn't make them
> proven.  And actually, there's a very good chance you're not even using
> sysvinit anymore - Ubuntu replaced sysvinit with upstart in 2006, RHEL 6
> shipped with upstart in 2010, Mac OS X Tiger shipped with launchd in 2005,
> Solaris has used SMF since at least 2005.  I'm sure that there are other
> examples that I'm not aware of.  systemd is building on and refining a lot
> of what has come before.
>
>
> > Binary logging similarly bothers me.  Logging systems have been in place
> > for years and have been battle tested and proven.
> >
>
> Utter crap.  Once you want to do more than occasionally grep through the
> log files, you'll quickly discover how broken things are.  First of all,
> most programs don't log timestamps with enough precision.  Timestamps that
> only include seconds are almost worthless.  Millisecond precision (0.001s)
> is just barely adequate.  Nanosecond precision (0.000001) second would be
> preferable.  Second, most programs don't log timestamps with a time zone.
> When you can reach out and touch all of your servers you wouldn't think
> that time zones in log files matters, but when you have systems spread
> across multiple time zones, all of a sudden it matters a lot.  Third, most
> programs get log rotation wrong, or don't do it at all and leave it to
> external programs like logrotate that cause as many problems as they
> solve.  Fourth, when dealing with lots of log data, you really want them
> structured and indexed so that they can be efficiently searched.
>
> And that's just getting me started...
>
> The whole mind-set of fixing things that are not broken bothers me.
> >
>
> A lot of us do not share that opinion.  Early on in the project Lennart
> Poettering spent a lot of time explaining why the previous init systems
> were broken.
>
> --
> Jeff Ollie
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