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

Wed Aug 24 09:19:03 CEST 2011

On Tuesday, 23 August 2011 15:30:45 Colin Guthrie wrote:
+> '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
+
+We don't even have libcgroup or equivalent in the distribution yet ... so I 
+would say is is a bit premature to show this as an advantage IMHO ...
+
+> and the ability to restart network services
+> without losing a single connection is a revelation for me.
+
+Have all the services got support for this yet?
+
+> 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 really don't read the scripts for every service, but quite often I do need 
+to adjust some setting catered for in the script, so I read 
+/etc/sysconfig/foo, and adjust it there.
+
+Although I have read a number of the systemd blogs, there are still some 
+unanswered questions. Such as, what should happen to utility functions in the 
+init scripts (e.g. 'service apache configtest' or 'service ldap check'), or 
+other checks that are done in the init script before starting the service 
+(such as ensuring ownership of files by the ldap user, which is a common trap 
+users fall into after doing an import, or re-indexing).
+
+> I just need to understand the process of
+> services management in general and I can pretty much work with
+> everything.
+
+Surely 'service foo {start|stop|restart|reload}' is also a generic approach to 
+services management?
+
+> 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.
+
+But, sometimes they are required, and what is the replacement for the 
+functionality?
+
+> 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.
+
+And MacOS has good server market share?
+
+> 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.
+
+The rest of the discussion in this mail by now was about systemd. For 
+NetworkManager, I have some more questions.
+
+At present, a number of my machines have scripts that hook into the network 
+scripts. For example, one to update the bind forwarders from the DNS IPs 
+returned by pppd when the interface comes up. On another machine, a script 
+that unloads the wireless broadband driver when the interface goes down (I 
+think this modem has buggy firmware). Then, there are the existing scripts 
+shipped in the distribution (e.g. to reload squid).
+
+In the NetworkManager world, are all of these taken care of? If not, and I 
+have to script them myself, now I guess I have to hook in to NM via dbus?
+
+Regards,
+Buchan
+