CentOS - Apr 2017 - OT: systemd Poll - So Long, and Thanks for All the fish.

On Mon, April 17, 2017 17:13, Warren Young wrote:
>
> Also, I???ll remind the list that one of the *prior* times the systemd
> topic came up, I was the one reminding people that most of our jobs
> summarize as ???Cope with change.???
>
At some point 'coping with change' is discovered to consume a
disproportionate amount of resources for the benefits obtained.  In my
sole opinion the Linux community appears to have a
change-for-change-sake fetish. This is entirely appropriate for an
experimental project.  The mistake that I made many years ago was
inferring that Linux was nonetheless suitable for business.

To experimenters a ten year product cycle may seem an eternity. To
many organisations ten years is barely time to work out all the kinks
and adapt internal processes to automated equivalents.  And the
smaller the business the more applicable that statement becomes.

I do not have any strong opinion about systemd as I have virtually no
experience with it.  But the regular infliction of massively
disruptive changes to fundamental software has convinced us that Linux
does not meet our business needs. Systemd and Upstart are not the
cause of that.  They are symptoms of a fundamental difference of focus
between what our firm needs and what the Linux community wants.

-- 
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James B. Byrne                mailto:ByrneJB at Harte-Lyne.ca
Harte & Lyne Limited          http://www.harte-lyne.ca
9 Brockley Drive              vox: +1 905 561 1241
Hamilton, Ontario             fax: +1 905 561 0757
Canada  L8E 3C3

On Wed, Apr 19, 2017 at 5:21 AM, James B. Byrne <byrnejb at harte-lyne.ca>
wrote:
>
> On Mon, April 17, 2017 17:13, Warren Young wrote:
>
>>
>> Also, I???ll remind the list that one of the *prior* times the systemd
>> topic came up, I was the one reminding people that most of our jobs
>> summarize as ???Cope with change.??
>>
>
> At some point 'coping with change' is discovered to consume a
> disproportionate amount of resources for the benefits obtained.  In my
> sole opinion the Linux community appears to have a
> change-for-change-sake fetish. This is entirely appropriate for an
> experimental project.  The mistake that I made many years ago was
> inferring that Linux was nonetheless suitable for business.
>
> To experimenters a ten year product cycle may seem an eternity. To
> many organisations ten years is barely time to work out all the kinks
> and adapt internal processes to automated equivalents.  And the
> smaller the business the more applicable that statement becomes.
>
> I do not have any strong opinion about systemd as I have virtually no
> experience with it.  But the regular infliction of massively
> disruptive changes to fundamental software has convinced us that Linux
> does not meet our business needs. Systemd and Upstart are not the
> cause of that.  They are symptoms of a fundamental difference of focus
> between what our firm needs and what the Linux community wants.
Apple has had massively disruptive changes on OS X and iOS. Windows
has had a fairly disruptive set of changes in Windows 10. About the
only things that don't change are industrial OS's.

When it comes to breaking user space, there's explicit rules against
that in Linux kernel development. And internally consistent API/ABI
stability is something you're getting in CentOS/RHEL kernels, it's one
of the points the distributions exist. But the idea that Windows and
OS X have better overall API stability I think is untrue, having
spoken to a very wide assortment of developers who build primarily
user space apps.

What does happen, in kernel ABI changes can break your driver, as
there's no upstream promise for ABI compatibility within the kernel
itself. The effect of this is very real on say, Android, and might be
one of the reasons for Google's Fuscia project which puts most of the
drivers, including video drivers, into user space. And Microsoft also
rarely changes things in their kernel, so again drivers tend to not
break.


-- 
Chris Murphy

On Apr 19, 2017, at 2:22 PM, Chris Murphy <lists at colorremedies.com>
wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Apr 19, 2017 at 5:21 AM, James B. Byrne <byrnejb at
harte-lyne.ca> wrote:
>> 
>> On Mon, April 17, 2017 17:13, Warren Young wrote:
>> 
>>> Also, I???ll remind the list that one of the *prior* times the
systemd
>>> topic came up, I was the one reminding people that most of our jobs
>>> summarize as ???Cope with change.??
>> 
>> At some point 'coping with change' is discovered to consume a
>> disproportionate amount of resources for the benefits obtained?Linux
>> does not meet our business needs.
> 
> Apple has had massively disruptive changes on OS X and iOS. Windows
> has had a fairly disruptive set of changes in Windows 10.
?And FreeBSD finally just got through the whole binary-package-everything phase,
meaning installation and upgrade practices have changed almost entirely in the
past few years.  And before that, there was ?move everything to ZFS,? which
totally changed file system management, the boot system, backups, at-rest data
encryption, file sharing services, and more.

The other BSDs haven?t had as much change, but that?s both bad and good.

Solaris has had mighty shakeups in the past 10 so years, much before the Oracle
buyout and much more after.

So what is Harte & Lyne Limited moving *to*?
> the Linux community appears to have a
> change-for-change-sake fetish.
Are you seriously saying that none of the change in the Linux world in the past
10 years has had any practical benefit?

The only such charge that immediately comes to mind for me is this move in the
past 5 years or so to ?flat? user interfaces, led by the mobile world but
infecting desktop OSes as well?but not Linux.  If Linux were doing change for
change?s sake, wouldn?t Linux have flattened its UIs like Google, Apple, and
Microsoft have?

I wonder if what you?d actually prefer is magical levels of foresight, so that
we could have made all the change required 30, 40 years ago, and now just be
riding on top of perfect stability?

Or is is that you think the *ix world already had perfection and lost it?  What
was the perfect OS, what version, and does it still run your apps today?  Will
it still run them 10 years from now?