[tssva]

The systemd init system doesn't have a qrcode generator. This is typical anti-systemd FUD of trying to conflate the systemd init process and the other processes available as part of the systemd project.

The separate journald log server available as part of the systemd project can generate qrcodes. journald can cryptographically sign logs so that future log tampering can be detected. This requires two keys, a sealing key and a verification key. The verification key must be stored off server. When the keys are generated systemd can display a qrcode to allow easy recording of the verification key.

[pseudalopex]

I mostly like systemd, but judging the project as an init system with a bunch of other functionality tacked on is completely fair. The init daemon requires the logging daemon and vice versa, so they aren't really separate.

[dozzie]

Ah yes, this totally separate journald that you can replace with something else, except that you cannot, you can only run it in forwarding mode beside other logging daemon. Very modular. Totally not a part of an init system.

[gsich]

It seems some people on HN love to hate sytemd. Even though they can't come up with an alternative that's better. Hint: It's not sysvinit.

[Karunamon]

In all honesty I've never yet administered a system where the addition of systemd solved a problem I actually had. I would gladly go back to Upstart (or hell, even sysv) in a heartbeat.

Put another way, as a couple of anecdotes at $day_job, the boot time benefits (the one thing people always seem to bring up in defense of this ever-growing behemoth) were eaten up months ago in time troubleshooting, transitioning, and working around its corner cases.

More humorously, the words "fucking" and "goddamn" used to be followed by the name of some internal program known for being clunky. After getting up to Ubuntu 16 and Cent 7 in the whole environment, those words tend to be followed by "systemd".

[matthewmacleod]

Counter-anecdote - since switching to operating systems using systemd, I haven’t had a single bug or issue with the init system or writing startup scripts, because finally they use incredibly obvious files that I can write myself.

For me it’s basically magic that I can now write a simple declarative file that describes how to run an application, and from there it works with all of the expected features.

[icebraining]

Systemd didn't introduce this, though; many alternative init systems already had declarative configurations.

[ipioxu15]

Yes. However, systemd did this part certainly right --- the service files and their dependencies are much easier to understand compared to e.g. its counterpart in upstart.

[gsich]

I have found that systemd solves many problems. I couldn't care less about boot times, especially on servers. The service startup with dependencies is very nice and easy compared to sysv. You write like 10 lines and it just works. You get status output of the service without having to grep through the log file. Sometimes you don't need a logfile, which makes this even better, as you don't need to use screen/tmux workarounds. You see if a service is running or has exited.

Same for timers. Debugging not running cronjobs is a pain in comparison.

Writing sysv init scripts is so fucking shit, people started to dump everything in /etc/rc.local, especially for earlier RPi versions of Debian.

[emmelaich]

I used to make sailors blush with the intensity of expletives about various sysvinit scripts.

Do you know about Kafka, Spark, and Jenkins? They're all Java but they each have their batshit fucking insane quirks on starting up.

One of them runs in foreground. One of them runs in background.

Jenkins (actually as Hudson) had it's own fucking Unix daemon-isation inbuilt. For a Java program!

Nuts!

Thankfully pretty much popular Java server has a systemd unit file written for it which avoids any shell and Exec's Java directly.

[yrro]

I can't fathom why it's so popular for Java programs to ship a slew of poorly-tested shell scripts that read environment variables and config files, and transform these into -D arguments to the java command. Why on earth don't they just o that with Java!?

[JdeBP]

Enjoy the House of Horror.

* http://jdebp.info./FGA/systemd-house-of-horror/

[yrro]

Indeed, I have referred to your web site many times over the years while unpicking various horrific daemon control shell scripts in order to run them under sane init systems... :)

[icebraining]

We used Upstart until just a couple of years ago, and it was still losing service processes regularly (as in, you start a service, then you stop it, but the process keeps running, despite Upstart telling you it's stopped).

I don't know if systemd is better (I've never managed a server fleet with it), but Upstart certainly wasn't good enough.

[mdekkers]

It seems some people on HN love to hate sytemd. Even though they can't come up with an alternative that's better.

I hated systemd before it was cool to hate systemd. I never had a problem with sysvinit as the root casuse, but I had many problems with systemd as the root cause.

[tomohawk]

sysvinit is a strawman.

the real choice was between upstart and systemd, and upstart was clearly superior, especially for common use cases.

[dogecoinbase]

You don't have to be a chef to know you're getting bad food.

[inferiorhuman]

Hint: both sysvinit and BSD init are better. They are more mature, have fewer moving parts, are easier to debug without specialized tools, and are better understood. Plus the decoupled nature of init systems reap bonuses for system stability (unlike systemd).

Having a QR code parser as part of something that's tangentially related to the init system in concept but deeply embedded into systemd in practice is exactly what the post you were replying to is complainig about. It's unnecessarily complex.

[gsich]

They are not.

>They are more mature

what does that even mean? that they are older? Similar to "modern XYZ" this phrase doesn't mean anything.

You seem to repeat what other people say like the "QR code" without even looking it up.

[inferiorhuman]

> They are not.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32924335/using-systemd-w...

> The journal is the only mandatory component of systemd outside PID1.

Seems pretty deeply embedded to me.

> what does that even mean? that they are older?

They are older, better understood, and there are fewer substantive bugs (e.g. malformed blob = run service as root).

> You seem to repeat what other people say like the "QR code" without even looking it up.

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2012-October...

Not sure what else you're doing with a QR library, except maybe building tetris (which seems like a bad idea for something purported to be an init system).

[gsich]

>They are older, better understood, and there are fewer substantive bugs (e.g. malformed blob = run service as root).

You used the same argument ("They are more mature") again. It's still not saying anything.

[inferiorhuman]

> It's still not saying anything.

Sure it is. An init system should, first and foremost, be stable and well understood. By virtue of its size and youth, systemd is not (at least not by devs and end users).