On Sat, 14 Dec 2024 08:52:14 GMT
rlhamil@smart.net (Richard L. Hamilton) gabbled:
>In article <vit3dg$1quau$1@dont-email.me>,
>> This was all before systemd came on the scene.
>
>It spawned other processes, and where the idea of run levels existed,
>selected what to spawn based on those.
>
>It did not do tricky communication with processes, elaborately
>manipulate their initial environment, and except for adopting orphans

Which to anyone except poettering and his fanboys its quite obvious it doesn't
need to as a wrapper script can do that quite nicely.

>MacOS launchd is arguably even worse insofar as it also has things like
>Mach namespaces to deal with.

And XML config. Ugh. Why people persist with the hideousness that is XML when
the much clearer json is pretty much standard now beats the hell out of me.

On 14.12.2024 10:09, Richard L. Hamilton wrote:
>
> AIX ("AIX Isn't uniX") [...]

Since I've never heard that I was tempted to ask whether that's
true or a joke; a quick look into the Web suggested "Advanced
Interactive eXecutive". - I admit your interpretation is nicer.

Janis

On 2024-12-13, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
> On Fri, 13 Dec 2024 20:07:58 -0000 (UTC), Jim Jackson wrote:
>
>> On 2024-12-11, Nicolas George <nicolas$george@salle-s.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> Jim Jackson , dans le message <slrnvlk56u.2qa.jj@iridium.wf32df>, a
>>> ??crit??:
>>>>
>>>> My God, how did we all manage running services before systemd came
>>>> along?
>>>
>>> Badly, with services that have crashed and nobody noticed for weeks.
>>
>> People keep saying that. But in my experience services were run as
>> efficiently as they seem to be run today. Perhaps the team I worked in
>> knew what it was doing :-)
>
> How many custom services were you running on a single machine, just out of
> curiosity?

What do you mean by custom? There were database services, web-based
services, information servers other than web all running on 2 big
servers. The infrastructure services (file servers, DNS, NTP, DHCP,
boot servers, automatic backup etc etc) were split between 2 servers
with backup and failover. not sure how you'd classify our mail service,
as infrastructure or custom, but it was far from bog-standard.

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:
> On Fri, 13 Dec 2024 07:42:07 -0800, John Ames wrote:
>> This bears repeating. Why *anybody* decided to trust the judgement of
>> the person who gave us the jankiest of all the incredibly janky *nix
>> audio subsystems is beyond comprehension.
>
> There was no reason why you had to. You could easily have created your own
> distro without any of his code in it, if you wanted to. Or become an
> aficionado of one of the existing distros that did exactly that.
>
> Open Source is all about choice. If you can’t stand the thought of people
> making different choices from you, you know what you can do.

If these people get paid by $big_name_companies, there's exactly nothing
individuals can do about that. Unless they happen to be rich enough that
they can waste a ton of money on their hobbies and then, they'd still
need to get a competent work force from somewhere.

On Sat, 14 Dec 2024 15:20:25 -0000 (UTC), Jim Jackson wrote:

> On 2024-12-13, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 13 Dec 2024 20:07:58 -0000 (UTC), Jim Jackson wrote:
>>
>>> On 2024-12-11, Nicolas George <nicolas$george@salle-s.org> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Jim Jackson , dans le message <slrnvlk56u.2qa.jj@iridium.wf32df>, a
>>>> ??crit??:
>>>>>
>>>>> My God, how did we all manage running services before systemd came
>>>>> along?
>>>>
>>>> Badly, with services that have crashed and nobody noticed for weeks.
>>>
>>> People keep saying that. But in my experience services were run as
>>> efficiently as they seem to be run today. Perhaps the team I worked in
>>> knew what it was doing :-)
>>
>> How many custom services were you running on a single machine, just out
>> of curiosity?
>
> What do you mean by custom?

Code that you had to write substantially from scratch, as opposed to
configuring standard DBMS, Web, directory, MTA, DNS etc.

I ask because the standard services will already have their startup
requirements worked out, because your own would require you to create your
own startup scripts. Which is where the trouble would often start, with
sysvinit.

On Sat, 14 Dec 2024 08:52:14 GMT, Richard L. Hamilton wrote:

> MacOS launchd is arguably even worse insofar as it also has things like
> Mach namespaces to deal with.

Linux has namespaces. Everything, just about, is isolatable in its own
namespace: mounted filesystems, network interfaces, processes, user IDs,
even the system time and hostname. Put them all together, and you get
containers.

And yes, launchd was an inspiration for systemd.

On Sat, 14 Dec 2024 20:16:08 +0000
Rainer Weikusat <rweikusat@talktalk.net> gabbled:
>Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:
>> On Fri, 13 Dec 2024 07:42:07 -0800, John Ames wrote:
>>> This bears repeating. Why *anybody* decided to trust the judgement of
>>> the person who gave us the jankiest of all the incredibly janky *nix
>>> audio subsystems is beyond comprehension.
>>
>> There was no reason why you had to. You could easily have created your own
>> distro without any of his code in it, if you wanted to. Or become an
>> aficionado of one of the existing distros that did exactly that.
>>
>> Open Source is all about choice. If you can’t stand the thought of people
>> making different choices from you, you know what you can do.
>
>If these people get paid by $big_name_companies, there's exactly nothing
>individuals can do about that. Unless they happen to be rich enough that
>they can waste a ton of money on their hobbies and then, they'd still
>need to get a competent work force from somewhere.

The sort of idiots who make those "why don't you write your own" remarks
probably still live with and are financed by mum and dad so don't see the
issue with spending months rolling your own system. Plus they seem to have
some kind of believe that you shouldn't criticise something unless you have
the ability to replicate it youself which means no one should ever comment on
any music, films, TV, food etc they disliked unless they could make a hollywood
blockbuster, album, whatever themselves. Its a very juvenile attitude.

Muttley@dastardlyhq.com writes:
> On Sat, 14 Dec 2024 20:16:08 +0000
> Rainer Weikusat <rweikusat@talktalk.net> gabbled:
>>Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:
>>> On Fri, 13 Dec 2024 07:42:07 -0800, John Ames wrote:
>>>> This bears repeating. Why *anybody* decided to trust the judgement of
>>>> the person who gave us the jankiest of all the incredibly janky *nix
>>>> audio subsystems is beyond comprehension.
>>>
>>> There was no reason why you had to. You could easily have created your own
>>> distro without any of his code in it, if you wanted to. Or become an
>>> aficionado of one of the existing distros that did exactly that.
>>>
>>> Open Source is all about choice. If you can’t stand the thought of people
>>> making different choices from you, you know what you can do.
>>
>>If these people get paid by $big_name_companies, there's exactly nothing
>>individuals can do about that. Unless they happen to be rich enough that
>>they can waste a ton of money on their hobbies and then, they'd still
>>need to get a competent work force from somewhere.
>
> The sort of idiots who make those "why don't you write your own" remarks
> probably still live with and are financed by mum and dad so don't see the
> issue with spending months rolling your own system.

I actually did. By the time when systemd started to become a serious
nuisance, I had just started to work on a different product. The
previous had been an (ARM9-based) UTM appliance and I actually wrote an
own init for that. I was determined to avoid doing that again but still
needed more process management than sysvinit + rc provided.

I started this as sort-of a conscious anti-systemd experiment. The idea
was that, whenever I needed some process management feature, I'd write a
(fairly small) C program to provide that and find out how far this would
get me. That was about fifteen years ago. I've meanwhile accumulated 38
of these C program with a total size of 5690 lines of code and that's
enough for all of my process management needs and I'm dealing with some
more complicated stuff then people just running web servers.

This is arguably not open source but the copyright belongs to my
employer. OTOH, if it were, mainstream Linux distributions wouldn't use
it, not the least because many people just love complicated stuff (like
systemd).

> Plus they seem to have some kind of believe that you shouldn't
> criticise something unless you have the ability to replicate it
> youself which means no one should ever comment on any music, films,
> TV, food etc they disliked unless they could make a hollywood
> blockbuster, album, whatever themselves. Its a very juvenile attitude.

Indeed.

On Sun, 15 Dec 2024 21:25:36 +0000
Rainer Weikusat <rweikusat@talktalk.net> wibbled:
>employer. OTOH, if it were, mainstream Linux distributions wouldn't use
>it, not the least because many people just love complicated stuff (like
>systemd).

True. Far too many people think complicated = clever. What they don't
understand is that really smart people have the ability to make complicated
stuff simple for the user. Sadly not an ability Poettering has.

Richard L. Hamilton wrote:

> In article <vinp86$avd9$1@dont-email.me>,
> Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:
>> On Tue, 3 Dec 2024 08:20:51 -0000 (UTC), Muttley wrote:
>>
>>> I'm wondering on Linux if it would be enough on Linux to spoof ttyname()
>>> and isatty() using LD_PRELOAD. However it seems doing something similar
>>> on a Mac is the usual over complicated Apple hot mess.
>>
>> macOS may be a licensee of the "Unix" trademark, but it does not work the
>> way people expect when they think of the term "Unix".
>
> It probably does as of the version of the formal specification they met
> to be allowed to use the trademark.

It is certified as conforming to "UNIX 03", which is so named because
the certification program was launched in 2003, although by coincidence
the corresponding version of The Single UNIX Specification (SUS) is
version 3. There have since been SUSv4 (2008) and SUSv5 (2024) so
macOS is two versions behind. (AIX and Solaris are/were certified to
SUSv4; there is no certification program yet for SUSv5.)

SUSv3/4 included dlopen(), dlsym() and dlclose() but no other
requirements related to dynamic linking. SUSv5 adds the ability to
build shared libraries and dynamic executables using the c17 utility,
but doesn't specify how their loading can be controlled with
environment variables.

The things Lawrence said don't work on macOS the way people expect
UNIX to work are almost certainly all, just like LD_PRELOAD, not
specified by SUS. (Otherwise macOS would fail some of the tens of
thousands of tests it has to pass in order for each new macOS version
to be certified.)

--
Geoff Clare <netnews@gclare.org.uk>

On Sat, 14 Dec 2024 01:35:37 -0000 (UTC)
Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

> There was no reason why you had to. You could easily have created
> your own distro without any of his code in it, if you wanted to. Or
> become an aficionado of one of the existing distros that did exactly
> that.

Have done - been running Devuan since 2016.

> Open Source is all about choice. If you can’t stand the thought of
> people making different choices from you, you know what you can do.

The fact that people are free to make stupid choices does not mean that
other people aren't allowed to call out stupidity where they see it.

On Mon, 16 Dec 2024 08:16:28 -0000 (UTC), Muttley wrote:

> Far too many people think complicated = clever.

You mean, clever like struggling with complicated workarounds to clunky,
ancient init systems that don’t actually handle service management very
well, when more modern ones solve long-standing problems in a much simpler
and more elegant fashion?

On Mon, 16 Dec 2024 07:55:19 -0800, John Ames wrote:

> The fact that people are free to make stupid choices does not mean that
> other people aren't allowed to call out stupidity where they see it.

Notice that all the complaints seem to go in one direction, not the other?
We only see systemd-haters complaining about those using it, you don’t see
systemd users complaining about those who don’t?

On Mon, 16 Dec 2024 20:15:02 -0000 (UTC)
Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

> Notice that all the complaints seem to go in one direction, not the
> other? We only see systemd-haters complaining about those using it,
> you don’t see systemd users complaining about those who don’t?

That would likely be because systemd users are getting what they want,
and aren't being pushed onto sysvinit by distro maintainers.

On 2024-12-14, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
> On Sat, 14 Dec 2024 15:20:25 -0000 (UTC), Jim Jackson wrote:
>
>> On 2024-12-13, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>>
>>> On Fri, 13 Dec 2024 20:07:58 -0000 (UTC), Jim Jackson wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 2024-12-11, Nicolas George <nicolas$george@salle-s.org> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> Jim Jackson , dans le message <slrnvlk56u.2qa.jj@iridium.wf32df>, a
>>>>> ??crit??:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> My God, how did we all manage running services before systemd came
>>>>>> along?
>>>>>
>>>>> Badly, with services that have crashed and nobody noticed for weeks.
>>>>
>>>> People keep saying that. But in my experience services were run as
>>>> efficiently as they seem to be run today. Perhaps the team I worked in
>>>> knew what it was doing :-)
>>>
>>> How many custom services were you running on a single machine, just out
>>> of curiosity?
>>
>> What do you mean by custom?
>
> Code that you had to write substantially from scratch, as opposed to
> configuring standard DBMS, Web, directory, MTA, DNS etc.

Ok I've done specific network monitoring stuff from scratch - back in
the day, when SNMP was a new thing. But it was easier to control than
other stuff because I (and a couple of others) wrote it - we knew it -
so what's difficult? We even transitioned it from pre-SYS-V init to
SYS-V init, and I remember no difficulties.

>
> I ask because the standard services will already have their startup
> requirements worked out, because your own would require you to create your
> own startup scripts. Which is where the trouble would often start, with
> sysvinit.

On 2024-12-16, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
> On Mon, 16 Dec 2024 07:55:19 -0800, John Ames wrote:
>
>> The fact that people are free to make stupid choices does not mean that
>> other people aren't allowed to call out stupidity where they see it.
>
> Notice that all the complaints seem to go in one direction, not the other?
> We only see systemd-haters complaining about those using it, you don???t see
> systemd users complaining about those who don???t?

No. But I think some of us get a bit pissed at some people making out
that previous inits were (almost) unworkable - which is palpably false.

On Mon, 16 Dec 2024 23:07:37 -0000 (UTC), Jim Jackson wrote:

> ... I think some of us get a bit pissed at some people making out
> that previous inits were (almost) unworkable - which is palpably false.

Do you understand what a “strawman” argument is?

On Mon, 16 Dec 2024 23:03:46 -0000 (UTC), Jim Jackson wrote:

> Ok I've done specific network monitoring stuff from scratch - back in
> the day, when SNMP was a new thing. But it was easier to control than
> other stuff because I (and a couple of others) wrote it - we knew it -
> so what's difficult? We even transitioned it from pre-SYS-V init to
> SYS-V init, and I remember no difficulties.

Anything with this <https://www.phoronix.com/news/Facebook-systemd-2018>
level of complexity?

On Mon, 16 Dec 2024 19:51:36 -0000 (UTC)
Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wibbled:
>On Mon, 16 Dec 2024 08:16:28 -0000 (UTC), Muttley wrote:
>
>> Far too many people think complicated = clever.
>
>You mean, clever like struggling with complicated workarounds to clunky,
>ancient init systems that don’t actually handle service management very
>well, when more modern ones solve long-standing problems in a much simpler
>and more elegant fashion?

Sure, but we're talking about systemd.

On Tue, 17 Dec 2024 02:37:24 -0000 (UTC)
Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wibbled:
>On Mon, 16 Dec 2024 23:07:37 -0000 (UTC), Jim Jackson wrote:
>
>> ... I think some of us get a bit pissed at some people making out
>> that previous inits were (almost) unworkable - which is palpably false.
>
>Do you understand what a “strawman” argument is?

Is it irony week again?

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:
> On Mon, 16 Dec 2024 08:16:28 -0000 (UTC), Muttley wrote:
>> Far too many people think complicated = clever.
>
> You mean, clever like struggling with complicated workarounds to clunky,
> ancient init systems that don’t actually handle service management very
> well, when more modern ones solve long-standing problems in a much simpler
> and more elegant fashion?

The systemd-252 codebase which is used for Debian 12 is composed of
(sloccount) 690,648 lines of code. That's anything but simple.

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:
> On Mon, 16 Dec 2024 07:55:19 -0800, John Ames wrote:
>> The fact that people are free to make stupid choices does not mean that
>> other people aren't allowed to call out stupidity where they see it.
>
> Notice that all the complaints seem to go in one direction, not the other?
> We only see systemd-haters complaining about those using it, you don’t see
> systemd users complaining about those who don’t?

Hmm ... what do you think you are doing here?

:-)

On Tue, 17 Dec 2024 08:34:54 -0000 (UTC), Muttley wrote:

> On Mon, 16 Dec 2024 19:51:36 -0000 (UTC) Lawrence D'Oliveiro
> <ldo@nz.invalid> wibbled:
>
>>On Mon, 16 Dec 2024 08:16:28 -0000 (UTC), Muttley wrote:
>>
>>> Far too many people think complicated = clever.
>>
>>You mean, clever like struggling with complicated workarounds to clunky,
>>ancient init systems that don’t actually handle service management very
>>well, when more modern ones solve long-standing problems in a much
>>simpler and more elegant fashion?
>
> Sure, but we're talking about systemd.

Why, what were you talking about?

On Tue, 17 Dec 2024 08:35:51 -0000 (UTC), Muttley wrote:

> On Tue, 17 Dec 2024 02:37:24 -0000 (UTC) Lawrence D'Oliveiro
> <ldo@nz.invalid> wibbled:
>
>>On Mon, 16 Dec 2024 23:07:37 -0000 (UTC), Jim Jackson wrote:
>>
>>> ... I think some of us get a bit pissed at some people making out that
>>> previous inits were (almost) unworkable - which is palpably false.
>>
>>Do you understand what a “strawman” argument is?

It’s when you try to tear down a false argument that the other side never
made.

Jim Jackson <jj@franjam.org.uk> writes:
> Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>> On Mon, 16 Dec 2024 07:55:19 -0800, John Ames wrote:
>>> The fact that people are free to make stupid choices does not mean
>>> that other people aren't allowed to call out stupidity where they
>>> see it.
>>
>> Notice that all the complaints seem to go in one direction, not the
>> other? We only see systemd-haters complaining about those using it,
>> you don???t see systemd users complaining about those who don???t?
>
> No. But I think some of us get a bit pissed at some people making out
> that previous inits were (almost) unworkable - which is palpably false.

‘Unworkable’ may be an exaggeration, but the practical issues and
functionality gaps were real; even if you didn’t personally experience
them, other people did. I think there were at least ten different
attempts to come up with something better in the free software world
alone. Meanwhile the commercial Unixes largely got their act together
long before Linux did.

Whether systemd was the best possible design, or just the best option
available, is another question, and perhaps more opinion-based.

--
https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/