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

[Colin Guthrie]

'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/

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