[lug] Thoughts on upgrading to CentOS 7

[Alan Robertson]

It's pretty clear that systemd is the most widely reviled feature of Linux for the last 10 years - maybe in its lifetime.

A complex solution to a simple problem that was already adequately solved.

But it's supporters were well-placed "politically" and their main arguments in favor of it were either easily solved in sysv (if anyone had cared), or were ad hominem arguments - variations on "You guys are all stupid" (replace stupid with luddite, etc).

But for most of the world it was clear that there was no point in opposing it - you won't win (because logic was irrelevant), and you'll be dragged through the mud. "Never argue with a pig - the pig loves it and you get all dirty".

And if you want to argue that here, there's even less of a point now - it's been a fact for a while, and isn't going away for most people.

People like to say that technology wins in open source. This appears to be a counterexample.

  -- Alan

On Tue, Mar 27, 2018, at 11:39 PM, Steve Litt wrote:
> On Mon, 26 Mar 2018 17:12:05 -0600
> Rob Nagler <nagler at bivio.biz> wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, Mar 26, 2018 at 9:27 AM, Steve Litt wrote:
> > >
> > > An alternative would be to see this as an opportunity to explore
> > > other distros. Plenty of distros have decided not to require their
> > > users to move to the controversial systemd.
> > >  
> > 
> > A very reasonable suggestion. With 20-20 hindsight, I might have not
> > walked down this path. There isn't one thing that's been too
> > complicated to code around, it's the fact that there are so many of
> > them.
> > 
> > init systems like runit or s6. This is *not* true of systemd, which
> > > contains several "poison pills" making it extremely difficult to
> > > replace.  
> > 
> > 
> > What are the poison pills?
> 
> Too numerous to describe, and most I never troubleshot down to the
> bitter end root cause.
> http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/init/manjaro_experiments.htm
> describes my attempts to put alternate inits like runit and Epoch on
> various systems. Invariably it was straightforward to replace sysvinit
> with runit or Epoch. Invariably, there was hoop after hoop to jump
> through trying to do the same thing on a systemd machine. And this was
> in late 2014, before a lot of the poison pills existed.
> 
> SteveT
> 
> Steve Litt 
> April 2018 featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques
>      of the Successful Technologist
> http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques
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-- 
  Alan Robertson
  alanr at unix.sh