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

[Buchan Milne]

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