[Mageia-dev] Proposal: Deprecate draknetcenter+network init scripts after systemd becomes default.

Tue Aug 23 15:30:45 CEST 2011

'Twas brillig, and Guillaume Rousse at 23/08/11 12:16 did gyre and gimble:
+> On 23/08/2011 12:26, Colin Guthrie wrote:
+>>> How would removing initscripts support helps enhancing networkmanager
+>>> integration ?
+>>
+>> Because the current philosophy of the Unix legacy is lots of individual
+>> utils from various packages cobbled together with some glue shell
+>> scripting code... and it's dying.
+>>
+>> The things that these individual tools implement are a few relatively
+>> simply commands to the kernel and it doesn't make sense to do all this
+>> in shell. It makes much more sense to do all these jobs in efficient
+>> code that runs *quickly* without forking hundreds of times. The code is
+>> still perfectly visible and easily hackable, but now things are much
+>> more robust and efficient.
+>
+> Booting faster makes sense on desktops, not on servers.
+
+Agreed, but on servers additional capabilities are added that I very
+much care about (much more than I care about boot speed on my laptop if
+I'm honest - with my SSD I'm looking at a 1 or 2 second boots - who
+cares about that!). I'm actually much more excited about systemd on the
+server than I am on a desktop.
+
+The cgroup management and the ability to restart network services
+without losing a single connection is a revelation for me. I will no
+longer worry about restarting apache because it might mess up a
+webservice request or similar. And if I get rooted and find rogue
+processes running, I'll be able to know exactly what service actually
+started that process which is incredibly useful when dealing with the
+mess left by intrusions.
+
+> My general
+> impression in this new trend (systemd, networkmanager, etc...) is the
+> need to compete with proprietary system (macos, windows) on end-user
+> segment, at the cost of genericity and simplicity.
+
+I think the simplicity argument is bogus. You are (IMO) confusing
+simplicity with ease of readability. Sure you can read through a script,
+but the process of starting and maintaining services now becomes
+*standard*. I don't have to read scripts for every single one of the
+1000s of init'ed services, I just need to understand the process of
+services management in general and I can pretty much work with
+everything. When you appreciate that, you'll see that systemd makes
+things much simpler overall. Sure you can't read a script, but that, in
+itself, has nothing to do with simplicity. Individual scripts tweaking
+certain things and adding secret arguments and such like is far, far
+more complex than a unified and defined way of working.
+
+And yes, if we're honest, MacOS has a far superior boot system in
+launchd and the networking support is also better with it's fast-start
+DHCP and other such nice things.
+
+I'm not suggesting network manager on servers here FWIW, but I think
+your reluctance to change should be massively outweighed by the benefits
+these changes bring, both to the server platform and to desktop systems.
+
+Col
+
+
+-- 
+
+Colin Guthrie
+mageia(at)colin.guthr.ie
+http://colin.guthr.ie/
+
+Day Job:
+  Tribalogic Limited [http://www.tribalogic.net/]
+Open Source:
+  Mageia Contributor [http://www.mageia.org/]
+  PulseAudio Hacker [http://www.pulseaudio.org/]
+  Trac Hacker [http://trac.edgewall.org/]
+