It's very interesting how the whole article (and Lennart) shies away from even uttering "package manager" and instead talks about containers.
This is fundamentally an implementation of Lennart's blog post - http://0pointer.net/blog/revisiting-how-we-put-together-linu.... That article used the words "We want an efficient way that allows vendors to package their software " ... which was followed by a storm of angry systemd-is-the-borg-it-needs-to-die tweets and articles.
Even on HN - the response to this article seems fairly muted... although it is a bigger political issue than even init systems. I wonder what the response would have been to "systemd introduces new portable packaging format"
Isn't ubuntu snap already doing all this? The competing standards I don't think help in this regard. Now to make a "portable service" I will need to make sure whatever I do can be used as a snap and a systemd portable service.
Why is it so hard to settle on a standard when it comes to this stuff? The same confusion exists when it comes to rpm and deb packaging formats. At the end of the day both do the same thing and yet to deliver software to redhat and debian systems you have to double your packaging effort.
I'm sorry, but I can't keep a straight face hearing the phrase "portable systemd."
I don't care what init system you run, but if you're writing userland software (GNOME, for one), than what init system I run is none of your damn business. For that matter, ideally you'd at least try to support the *BSDs.
As much as Systemd is the borg, I could at least live with that. I cannot live with the fact that systemd maintainers continue to say that having high-level userland software link to libsystemd is viable and acceptable. I cannot live with the fact that systemd continues to violate widely-accepted defaults for no reason (kill all processes on logout? really?). I cannot live with the fact that Lennart has widely stated that you should ignore POSIX and that all systems other than Linux don't matter.
Tangentially, glad to see Jon finally put up a signup banner for non-subscribers :)
(see discussion 3 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12224408)
Excited to see where this goes. After some recent issues with running docker on arch (vague devicemapper issues, inability to stop containers properly), and my newfound love for systemd using it from day to day on my personal computer (writing unit files is pretty darn easy), I've actually been seriously considering going back to writing applications that just get run as processes, and managed by something other than me.
If my understanding is right, the industry went:
CGI -> processes -> VMs -> containers
I'm thinking of going back to step 2.
This should surely stop the critics from saying systemd is doing too much and is bloatful.
No, but seriously I understand the reason why you'd want this, but what stops systemd from being divided into smaller modules? Like the Linux I'm used to.
I used to spend time arguing with people on the internet about how systemd was an actually very useful tool but I never changed any minds and didn't help myself any. Now I just wait and watch for new helpful things it does to show up and I live a much happier life.