Warning - FreeBSD (*BSD) entanglement in Linux ecosystem

David Jackson djackson452 at gmail.com
Wed Aug 22 02:04:27 UTC 2012


On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 9:20 PM, David Jackson <djackson452 at gmail.com>wrote:

>
>
> On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 10:09 AM, jb <jb.1234abcd at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> here is an interesting comment (basically echoing other people's view) on
>> Linux developments:
>> http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20120820
>> Reader Comments
>> "1 o Arch and systemd (by Microlinux on 2012-08-20 10:11:39 GMT from
>> France)
>> Much has been said on the subject of Systemd. Let me quote Eric
>> Hameleers, one
>> of Slackware's developers.
>>
>> "[...] systemd is essentially evil. It is invasive, extremely hostile to
>> other
>>  environments, threatening to kill non-Linux ecosystems which have hal,
>> udev,
>>  dbus, consolekit, polkit, udisks, upower and friends as dependencies. And
>>  every iteration of the software written by the Redhat employees who are
>>  responsible for hal, udev, consiolekit, polkit and now systemd are
>>  incompatible with previous releases, re-implementing their bad ideas
>> with new
>>  bad ideas... basically proving that these Redhat employees must be
>> declared
>>  unfit to work on the core of a Linux distro. However, the influence of
>> their
>>  employer is so big that these products are forced upon the wider UNIX
>>  community and at some point it will be "assimilate or die". I hope we
>>  (Slackware) will find a way where we do not have to assimilate but still
>>  manage to keep the distro working. I have high hopes for KDE which has no
>>  Redhat ties and so far, manages to stay clear of this mess, sticking to
>>  widely accepted standards."
>>
>> Cheers from a Slackware user."
>>
>> For those of you who are unfamiliar - systemd is a replacement for SysV,
>> LSB,
>> and Upstart init subsystem scripts.
>>
>> Together with some other technologies like GNOME 3 (soon GNOME OS ?) they
>> are
>> aiming at being Microsoft-like Linux distro (soon OS ?).
>>
>> On my FreeBSD machine:
>> $ ls /var/db/pkg/
>> ...
>> hal-0.5.14_19/
>> dbus-1.4.14_i3/
>> consolekit-0.4.3/
>> polkit-0.99/
>> upower-0.9.7/
>> ...
>>
>> Also, once again I refer to Linux-related ports in *BSD ecosystem
>> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/ports.cgi?query=linux&stype=all
>> and warn against becoming entangled in affairs of Linux ecosystem.
>>
>> jb
>>
>>
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>>
>
>
In reference to the claims that systemd developers "do not care about
portability", this is deceptive and misleading. It implies that he is
building in a dependance on intractable hardware platform dependance when
this is absolutely not the case, there is no dependance on a hardware
platform.There is nothing about systemd that FreeBSD could not easily
support. Yes, his software does use system call facilities provided by
Linux, but since this is a dependance on software systems, FreeBSD could
easily add these facilities to its own libraries and kernel. This fact
exposes what the complaints from some people are about, it has nothing to
do with portability, because these issues can be easily addressed in
software code by FreeBSD, it has to do with FreeBSD not wanting to
implement equivalent functionality as  Linux.

The fact is, FreeBSD can fully support systemd and all kernel and system
features, there is nothing here that is impossible for FreeBSD to support.

By doing so, it would give users MORE freedom rather than less freedom.
FreeBSD would not even be required to use systemd for its own bootup
sequence, which can be BSD init scripts still, but, systemd could be made
available on FreeBSD, called from FreeBSDs init scripts, for users that
wants to use it.

Some here would make it seem like it is impossible for FreeBSD to support
systemd, nothing could be further from the truth. No one is stopping
FreeBSD from implementing it or any other feature found in Linux.

I carefully looked through the documentation of systemd, I could see
nothing except for a well designed, powerful and flexible start up system
that is a major improvement. It IS backwards compatable with SysV and init
scripts, so, no one can say they are taking away someones capability to use
their own init scripts. BSD could continue to use its own startup init
system and optionally allow systemd to be called from this for software
that needs systemd. So, FreeBSD does not even have to change much about its
current init system to support systemd. systemd could be called from
FreeBSDs current init scripts as an addon rather than needing to replace
any of the existing init system.

I basically cannot see a rational reason to not support it.


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