[ale] Origins of Linux, do we care?

[Solomon Peachy]

On Sun, Sep 20, 2015 at 09:39:27AM -0400, James Sumners wrote:
> As for running Debian without systemd, good luck with that. The support for
> alternative inits won't last long for the same reasons Devuan is in limbo.
> And then'll come stuff like hostnamectl and machinectl and whatever else
> systemd decides to gobble up next for no discernible reason.

I'm not so sure about that -- as the old joke goes, when faced with a 
choice, Debian inevitably goes with "all of the above".

While I suspect the long-term writing is on the wall, for the forseeable 
future the Debian Project has committed to first-class support for 
multiple init systems (upstart, sysvinit, systemd, plus the hurd and 
kfreebsd inits too).  It will take a full GR vote to change that.

(To be blunt, the latter two are what's responsible for most of the 
 pain; the result is a sort of "least common denomination" situation
 where the rest of the distro can't even rely on the presence of glibc 
 or the Linux kernel itself, much less features provided by various 
 Linux-specific init or configuration tools)

But back to your specific points -- do you really manually type 
'hostname blablabla' on the command line to configure your system after 
every boot, or do you you put it in /etc/hostname and let your distro's 
scripts set it automatically it automatically on startup?

The same goes for machinectl -- its use is largely hidden as an 
implementation detail behind existing distro front-end scripts.  If you 
were using your distro's config files etc before, nothing changed 
afterwards.

Debian's actually an excellent example of backwards-compatibility in 
this regard, a direct consequence of their emphasis on seamless upgrades 
between major releases.

 - Solomon
-- 
Solomon Peachy        		       pizza at shaftnet dot org
Delray Beach, FL                          ^^ (email/xmpp) ^^
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
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