Re: [LAU] [arch-general] Lennart Poettering on udev-systemd

On Fri, August 17, 2012 3:22 pm, Chris Bannister wrote: As a musician... One of the fundamental problems I have is that a computer set up for desktop use is less than optimal for music. As the sole bread winner in a family I must be able to use My computer as a desktop machine as well as for music. The best way would be to have a computer(s) just for music and remove a lot of the un-needed junk. It used to be that one tool could decide what services would run in what run level and simply by changing run levels I could have a quiet machine (most services turned off). Enter upstart and or systemd. I have the former and I can turn some services off by runlevel (cron and friends that might do just about anything during recording) but to do that I have to edit a file for each one by hand. If I want to make some software to change things from a nice gui, it has to deal with three or more ways of doing things.... or worse. If you think init.d scripts are bad, try working with upstart files or as Ubuntu is, half and half... systemd would be half and half too. Both say they are backwards compatible with the old system, but the author of systemd at least is actively (in his own words) looking to get beyond that. Quite honestly, does it matter if the system takes 30 seconds to boot or 3 minutes? Only as a show off to a non-linux user. windows and OSx are one mode OSs and to be fair most people use their system that way, the days of RL2 for text base and RL3 for X are long gone. But the usefulness of different operating modes has not.... for a small number of people who do more than use their computer to write documents and browse the web while listening to MP3s. (there may be some game situations where a quiet machine would be nice too... I don't do games enough to worry) I agree with the links above, we are seeing versatility being removed Linux for the average user. A tight coupling of the kernel with init (of what ever kind) removes almost all of the embedded, science and fringe uses (like pro and semi-pro audio) Yes it took hours (months, weeks) to get init.d scripts to work, but so did it take all that time to get systemd and upstart just as far as they are. And they are not IMO finished yet. I have done some reading on upstart (a little less but some on systemd as well) They are designed to start the system and shut it down, not make changes mid run. upstart is lost if it is restarted without a reboot (sounds like windows), but the old init can be replaced with a new version and restarted. Upstart once it has started a sequence of programs may not be able to restart just one of them because startup depends on signals that are issued once (here I think systemd is the same). Upstart scripts only read the "and/or" states once. It is easy to look at something new and think it is great, but I expect (Linux systems being what they are) that there will be just as many messy work-arounds with the new stuff. A new system? great! but start with flexibility rather than speed. Scripts are still the most flexible things around. Make it so services can easily be turned off and on without hand editing or uninstalling... I agree with Debian's wait and see... think about all the uses and if this new thing will fit. -- Len Ovens www.OvenWerks.net