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by acdha 894 days ago
Yes - that lower level networking stuff is just a minefield of edge cases which most people never need but are really annoying if you’re unlucky enough to hit them, and Linux has always had this problem where if something works for Windows the people who run those broken networks and many users will say it’s a Linux problem. A lot of the systemd decisions are probably explained by someone getting a ticket saying their Red Hat laptop takes much longer than Mac to get on the corporate network or was unable to deal with the captive portal on some hotel Wi-Fi, and they realized fixing it was going to require work across 5 different code bases.
1 comments
20after4 894 days ago
I think this is the most likely explanation for why systemd includes everything but the kitchen sink. For consistency, and ease of maintenance, having it all under one umbrella is certainly a benefit (for the developers of systemd.)

Also, NIH is a hell of a drug.

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yencabulator 893 days ago
Systemd's catalogue of kitchen sinks is getting to be truly impressive. Here's an NVMe-over-TCP server, for some reason: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/main/src/storagetm/s...
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acdha 892 days ago
This is a great example of an edge case which many people might never need but is really useful in a pinch: that’s what provides the equivalent of the Mac target disk mode, which is really handy if you need to repair a no longer-bootable system.

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/1761066b135f1a322c...

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yencabulator 892 days ago
That's really not a great argument for why it belongs in systemd.

Kitchen sinks are generally useful, but 17 kitchen sinks in a helicopter is not a good idea.

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acdha 892 days ago
Where would you put it instead of something started by pid 1? It needs to boot the kernel and unlike macOS they have to run on a ton of different architectures so they can’t count on the firmware.
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yencabulator 892 days ago
Huh? It's just another userspace program serving TCP.
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znpy 893 days ago
Have you ever setup an iscsi shared device in linux? It’s quite complex and a bit messy.

If systemd can make something similar (i still get a block device from another host in the network) in a simpler manner that would be just awesome, truly a huge win for everybody.

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