Debian Dropping Linux Standard Base (lwn.net) 220
basscomm writes: For years (as seen on Slashdot) the Linux Standard Base has been developed as an attempt to reduce the differences between Linux distributions in an effort significant effort. However, Debian Linux has announced that they are dropping support for the Linux Standard Base due to a lack of interest.
From the article: "If [Raboud's] initial comments about lack of interest in LSB were not evidence enough, a full three months then went by with no one offering any support for maintaining the LSB-compliance packages and two terse votes in favor of dropping them. Consequently, on September 17, Raboud announced that he had gutted the src:lsb package (leaving just lsb-base and lsb-release as described) and uploaded it to the "unstable" archive. That minimalist set of tools will allow an interested user to start up the next Debian release and query whether or not it is LSB-compliant—and the answer will be 'no.'"
From the article: "If [Raboud's] initial comments about lack of interest in LSB were not evidence enough, a full three months then went by with no one offering any support for maintaining the LSB-compliance packages and two terse votes in favor of dropping them. Consequently, on September 17, Raboud announced that he had gutted the src:lsb package (leaving just lsb-base and lsb-release as described) and uploaded it to the "unstable" archive. That minimalist set of tools will allow an interested user to start up the next Debian release and query whether or not it is LSB-compliant—and the answer will be 'no.'"
Effort significant effort (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Effort significant effort (Score:5, Funny)
Yup. That's two efforts more than the editors make.
Re:Effort significant effort (Score:5, Funny)
I don't think that's fair at all. The editors make an effort significant effort to bring us quality high quality content.
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It's been a while since Bennet Haselton has contributed a frequent contribution, hasn't it?
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Sad part is, that was actually more coherent than the original.
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Content, or ads pretending to be content. (See previous article about Mozilla's content guidelines...)
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I think content content is the best content.
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because That's they're using using UDP.
Modtards (Score:2)
But where is modtard when you need them?
Re:Effort significant effort (Score:4, Informative)
Huh, looks like I accidentally my submission somehow. That was supposed to read, "...Linux Standard Base has been developed as an attempt to reduce the differences between Linux distributions in an effort to make programs portable between distributions without significant effort."
Re:Effort significant effort (Score:5, Funny)
"Huh, looks like I accidentally my submission somehow."
Maybe you accidentally your keyboard.
I accidentally {noun} (Score:2)
Maybe you accidentally your keyboard.
The whole keyboard [knowyourmeme.com]?
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"Huh, looks like I accidentally my submission somehow."
Maybe you accidentally your keyboard.
That would explain all of the
Well, most of it anyways.
Debian Spiral (Score:5, Funny)
It seems like Debian has decided to live up to its logo, the spiral. In adopting systemd and abandoning LSB, Debian has begun its death spiral.
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It seems like Debian has decided to live up to its logo, the spiral. In adopting systemd and abandoning LSB, Debian has begun its death spiral.
Identify the actual problem you are claiming is a problem. Random comments that XYZ is bad are unhelpful and not particularly nerdly.
Re: Debian Spiral (Score:5, Insightful)
Debian is behind Ubuntu and Linux mint. That accounts for most desktop Linux installs doesn't it?
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Except Linux Mint does NOT have systemd. wise.
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There's shims and udev and crap. I don't know how that really works but it doesn't prevent the init system to be upstart or init.
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> The sky certainly hasn't been falling with systemd
True. On the few hundred servers we've upgraded, systemd has been perfectly reliable and boots faster. Also, the custom units we've added work better than the typical Sys V init scripts my guys wrote in the past. It's great in that regard, but it does make it much harder to troubleshoot since stderr is swallowed and very often error messages don't make it into the journal.
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it does make it much harder to troubleshoot since stderr is swallowed and very often error messages don't make it into the journal.
But it boots faster, so the 20 seconds you save booting more than make up for the hours you have to spend fixing it.
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Yet, strangely, the only people I hear complaining about it (usually - note that this is usually) are those who haven't actually had any problems with it. I can see why they would prefer the older system (avoiding monolithic things is probably a good idea) but I don't see too many people complaining in the real world. There's one person, here on Slashdot, who's tearing it apart piece by piece. I think they're on section 8 or 9 of their process. Phantom someone maybe? I'd have to look and will do so if it is
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You forgot those of us who have been around long enough to have survived major sea changes like os390 -> UNIX -> Solaris -> windows -> linux. Systemd saddens me because it makes servers act like workstations. And sadly, the distro maintainers made way too hard of a turn into systemd, forgoing 20 y/o standards. For example, on a CentOS minimal system, no ifconfig/netstat? Instantly breaks monitoring tools.
So if I need to retool my infrastructure, I am now looking at the options without a "lin
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It's so hard that it's already done. As I understand, enabling full logging requires only a change to a single line in a configuration file.
Re: Debian Spiral (Score:2)
So 1 minute x a million systems. Efficient.
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And why isn't it turned on by default?
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As a sysadmin, I think it's to make my life miserable. As a user, I think it's because nobody gives a damn about logs for a system that's working.
After a quick search for the relevant document [freedesktop.org], it seems the default for stderr is to inherit settings, presumably from some kind of hierarchy that I don't know enough about to comment on. By default, then, I'd guess the top level discards logs.
From an architecture standpoint, that makes sense. On my work-related systems, I could just configure the top level, and
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Apparently in the "exec [freedesktop.org]" part of a service, change StandardOutput or StandardError to one of:
inherit, null, tty, journal, syslog, kmsg, journal+console, syslog+console, kmsg+console or socket
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Because stderr is for errors and systemd has no errors
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The anti systemd sentiment is getting a bit old? The sky certainly hasn't been falling with systemd already running on a lot of systems
"You know that thing that you tried like hell to keep from happening, and later, when it happened over your continual vociferous objections, you swore you wouldn't ever stop fighting to undo it to your last breath? Yeah, well, we, the winners, can't understand why you, the losers, are still angry about that."
I personally don't have a dog in this fight, and I don't know enough about what systemd does or doesn't do to judge, but trying to dismiss the significance of what is clearly a raw and throbbing emotio
Re: Debian Spiral (Score:4, Insightful)
it's "getting a bit old" still seems a little tone-deaf to me.
I think it amounts to "your arguments have been heard, logged, rejected, but you have the right to scream I told you so later", which is really where the incessant whining needs to end. I'm not convinced Wayland is famine, nor that systemd is pestilence. Unity certainly rode the pale horse, but the beauty of Linux is that we just fork around the offending software and carry on. Unlike when Microsoft or Apple do something reprehensible and we just have to suffer through it, with Linux we can just lob it off and replace it with something else.
When Ubuntu gets rid of Unity, I'll use Ubuntu again, until then there are plenty of good options. If systemd or Wayland make me cry, I'll do away with them. It's magic. Best, the people who like that sort of thing can keep having it, and not bother me in the slightest.
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You don't have to use Unity.
To escape Un(usabil)ity, install Xubuntu (Score:2)
When Ubuntu gets rid of Unity, I'll use Ubuntu again
Once I discovered that Unity is short for Unusability, I did sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop and never looked back.
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Crikey, I remember when it was Vi vs Emacs. They gotta argue about something.
These are without a doubt the most boring threads in my entire time here.
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I don't know the intricate details, I do know that updating Raspbian on a Pi2 to use systemd reduces boot time from 30 seconds to 15... that's pretty cool in my book.
I'm sure there's some way to get that 15 second boot time without using systemd, but I challenge anyone to do it more simply - starting from a standard distro.
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Let's be clear about what is going on: some of that time reduction is because systemd doesn't do things like checking that an IP address is not already in use on the network when bringing up an ehternet interface (at least, that's the default setting in systemd)
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Re: Debian Spiral (Score:5, Insightful)
it happened over your continual vociferous objections
That's exactly the problem.
I have a dog in this fight. I'm a sysadmin, who often gets involved in engineering Linux-based systems. My top priority is that everything works reliably when I need it. I don't really care what style of startup scripts we use. If it's something I already know, that makes life easier in some ways, but I'm not so arrogant as to assume that a better way isn't possible. If that new system's better just because I know that somebody's reviewed their assumptions in the last decade, that alone is worth a bit.
Then there's Slashdot. While most rational discussions about systemd tend to discuss pros and cons, Slashdot's hivemind seems to have decided that systemd is simply evil, with no clear reason why. I understand that we're all traditionalists, but this often goes beyond common sense. As you've noted, the arguments are loud, repetitive, and vehement, and they've been going on for longer than I care to remember. There are no suggestions for improvement, other than to fork huge projects and insist that nothing can ever change.
Frankly, the objections are a bit old. They're often just reiterating rumors and outdated information, and contribute nothing to the conversation. I expect the developers have heard the objections, and either resolved the complaints or chosen intentionally to take a different path. As a community, can we please now move on to the next topic of discussion?
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Slashdot's hivemind seems to have decided that systemd is simply evil, with no clear reason why. I understand that we're all traditionalists, but this often goes beyond common sense.
Well then somehow you have missed all of the good points. None of these points are "rumors" and I will be glad to show you sources for each.
Mission creep. Your init system now has a logon shell, and handles DHCPD tasks. Why is init handling logons and dhcpds?
Binary log files (PUKE)
Extremely poor documentation
Rushed to market with little objective testing
Bugs pile up with no resolution in sight, they just keep going for another dameon.
And then when you ask a fan of it why they like it, the response is "My
Funny thing is, systemd is *slower* than upstart (Score:4, Interesting)
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Mission creep. Your init system now has a logon shell, and handles DHCPD tasks. Why is init handling logons and dhcpds?
Neither of those things are true, which is a bad place to start your argument. It shows that you don't understand systemd, at all.
systemd added a command in which to start a new shell instance, using the same shell as before, while creating a new environment for it. It did not add a new shell.
systemd is also building new network configuration client components, not server components. If they can do a better job than NetworkManager, it'll replace that project. Right now, it hasn't.
Binary log files (PUKE)
The old logs are still
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What nobody's explained to me is why, if systemd is as bad as most people on Slashdot think it is, why is it in so many distros?
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It's on so many distros because it's on both Red Hat and Debian. It's on Red Hat because it's a good system for sysadmins who are maintaining many systems out of easy reach. I'm not sure WHY it's on Debian. There appears to have been some finagling of the voting process, but others have denied that, so I'm left unsure...but suspicious.
Anyway, Red Hat and Debian are the systems off of which most Linux distributions are built, and systemd is so constructed that independent software packages that are built
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No, systemd serves no purpose nor is it necessary for systems" out of easy reach". In fact, systemd may cause your remote system to never come back as it stupidly reverses the whole boot process and winds it way backwards over some trivial thing.
Experienced sysadmins don't want it and don't need it; bloated pointless complexity is not something you want to battle during unplanned production downtime
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Due to the popular Distributions based off of it. However Debian is more server target then desktop.
Re: Debian Spiral (Score:2)
Oh, there are many instances where it doesn't work. We've reverted to wheezy in our data centers and are waiting for devuan or another path forward.
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our servers are still on Squeeze
using the extended update sources for apt
otherwise manually upgrading stuff like apache/sql if needed
Squeeze is still my favorite.
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I like your style. But I'm super used to Wheezy now, and it's been rock solid for us.
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I'll probably update our servers slowly to that by December
Squeeze extended security updates end in February 2016
https://blog.g3rt.nl/how-to-en... [g3rt.nl]
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I am a person who's had two systems encounter must-revert-Jessie-to-Wheezy problems and another which will get reverted or BSDed when I can afford the office downtime.
That's what prompted me to stop by and argue with your "that don't actually happen" problem. And then I read your "despite numerous complaints (and valid concerns), is causing all so rts of headaches and isn't perfect".
How are you reconciling those two statements in your head?
I've heard heaps of "constructive input" - like, go back to text log
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I get the impression that a lot of your post, like most of the people who say systemd is great and the haters are just haters, just doesn't make a lot of sense.
Actually, I'm not a fan of systemd, but as a system programmer/administrator with 30 years of experience on just about every type of Unix system from PCs to Crays, I've seen a lot of good and bad things. With every change -- especially forced change -- comes griping - some valid, some not. I'm sure I'm not as much of an expert on this particular issue as others here, based on some of the posts, but I am trying to be optimistic. The idea of systemd (or some/much of it anyway) seems good (the Solaris Service
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Mint doesn't have that systemd shit yet, though it may soon
Well (Score:5, Funny)
My effort significant effort is effectively effortless. It's the effort effect at work. So there.
"editors" -- I don't think that word means what the slashdot "editors" think it means.
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No, wait. Is this one of those "evolving language" things where "editor", which used to mean "person who corrects prose" is now the word for "person who screws up prose?"
This could all be my fault.
Although I should point out that in the current social mindset, "my fault" actually means "their fault" or "your fault" or at a minimum, "someone else's fault."
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Honestly, at what time in the time you've been using Slashdot with that 6 digit ID have you ever seen evidence of the editors at Slashdot doing any of this stuff?
Honestly, you might as well be shocked and appalled that bears shit in the woods.
It's not like this is new.
Re:Well (Score:5, Funny)
You think that's traumatic ... humans shit in houses. In freakin' houses!!
And fish? You're not ready to hear about the fish.
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Oh. Man. Awesome :)
Debian? Some kind of Ubuntu based distro? (Score:2, Funny)
Why not go to the source and use Ubuntu instead?
I wondered about this (Score:2)
Debian's Filesystem Hierarchy Standard [debian.org] predated the LSB for quite a while. I kind of wondered if they would be able to make the two match, and why LSB didn't just pick that up and use it, considering it had been in place for so long.
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You missed a turn. Development of the FHS passed into the hands of the Linux Foundation, and it became part of the LSB. That's to say, they did pick it up and use it, and then continued to develop it.
Confused (Score:2)
What's the obligatory XKCD for removing a standard?
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https://xkcd.com/349/ [xkcd.com]
And what's even better... https://www.debian.org/ports/k... [debian.org]
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Success [xkcd.com]
The best part of that comic is the Alt Text: "40% of OpenBSD installs lead to shark attacks. It's their only standing security issue."
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Look, with GNU/kFreeBSD you're getting the worst of both worlds(*). Linux itself isn't really the problem. The problem comes from userland, and you will probably end up running systemd on GNU/kFreeBSD.
(*) Actually you get a shitty userland on a decent kernel.
More interesting than what it's dropping ... (Score:3, Interesting)
would be to know where Debian is heading.
I'd very much like to support a distro which has clearly stated technical and societal values which mirror my own, but it's hard to distinguish exactly what Debian's values are anymore. Merely embracing GPL licensing and its values doesn't really tell you a lot, because even code with ethically questionable goals can be GPL.
Perhaps it's time for a Debian Conference in which "What do we stand for?" could be addressed and made a little more specific.
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I fear that it is rather clear that what they stand for is a lot of bullshit that has nothing at all to do with what your, and my, values and priorities are.
Why the lack of interest? (Score:2)
I read the article but I wasn't quite certain why people weren't interested.
It sounds like it was too much work to maintain and implement, but it sounded like a lot of their implementation simply wasn't being used by anyone. Is it just the fact that LSB isn't as necessary/useful as people thought it would? I feel like most projects end up checking against Debian or RHEL and most distros adopt one of those as a sort of informal standard.
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The LSB is RedHat saying "do it precisely the way we do it", and calling it a "standard".
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Wait! (Score:2, Funny)
How can they do that? Isn't it all about the base [youtube.com]?
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All your base belong to us.
WTF? (Score:5, Informative)
What is all this doom and gloom about debian spiralling into oblivion and the end is coming? Did anybody read TFA before posting? The only thing that I can see from the LSB that has actually had a positive effect on me is the FHS, to which Debian is still adhering.
The LSB in its entirety actually contains a list of required libraries and standardized symlinks which may or may not be used on a system, but which must be there for "LSB compliance". IRL Debian package maintainers spend a lot of time and effort building dependancy lists into their packages so you DON'T have to have all those libraries on your system if you are not going to use them.
If you use dpkg or a wrapper (apt-get, aptitude, etc) to manage your system the LSB requirements are redundant at best and bloatware at worst.
The only situation where something like the LSB really makes sense is proprietary copy and run programs that depend on proprietary pieces. Even closed source proprietary software can utilize the apt database to resolve dependencies if it only has open source dependancies, or if the company hosts their own repository.
A large company running large numbers of Linux machines that wanted to standardize will probably (hopefully) do so to meet their requirements, rather than a generalized LSB desktop spec which attempts to be all things to all people.
If people went to their local computer store and bought software packages on CDs, and installed them on computers that did not have internet connectivity, the yes, up with the LSB. Do you do that? I don't even use a full installer package to install an OS anymore, just a network capable installer that then pulls all the dependancies in the appropriate versions from a repository on the net.
Yes, it was a noble concept, to try to define a standard set of always available libraries, and where they were, but in reality you rapidly run into the same problem software has on Windows, where software is written to depend on shared DLLs, but because people don't update their OS, or because people do update before the developer tests against a new version of the shared DLL, so software starts shipping with it's own copy of the relevant DLLs, and you end up with multiple versions of standard DLLs on your system.
When I started playing with slackware years ago, I really wished for something like the LSB, because I was sneakernetting everything home or taking days to download things on dialup. Those days are now distant memories.
Both rpm and apt solve the same problems, but do so without requiring a pile of unused libraries that just sit around cluttering up your system.
And just as a last point, how in the world does the LSB/NO LSB discussion compare in any way to the systemd/sysvinit discussion? One of them fundamentally changes the way a system operates, the other one just installs a bunch of packages that you can install just fine on your own. That's not an apples and oranges comparison, that is an apple and cinderblock comparison.
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That is, I believe, one of the primary reasons why the LSB was created - because a robust software archive, including both free and proprietary apps, is generally a good thing.
Then again, depending on the app, sometimes it's easier to just modify the environment than the app. Like a few programs we use that are designed and supported on RHEL. LSB would make life easier so
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I think what happened, is that a decade and a half ago, people thought they needed proprietary apps. But what actually happened is that we didn't get enough of them anyway (LSB or not) to keep our dependence going, so eventually we stopped missing them. LSB is from a time when your web browser might have been Netscape Navigator!
I b
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IRL Debian package maintainers spend a lot of time and effort building dependancy lists into their packages so you DON'T have to have all those libraries on your system if you are not going to use them.
This is a question of reasonable default configurations.
What if someone wants to write a program for their own use or for distribution among a small group of friends/coworkers/associates? The person could target the LSB so they can have a reasonably complete set of libraries and tools to work with and not have to chase down dependencies on each and every 'unique' Linux system where the program is going to run.
A specification like LSB is part of the solution to Dependency Hell. People who aren't familiar eno
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One of the complaints of software vendors has been that with Linux you would have to maintain a completely different installation package for each of the 200 Linux distributions. LSB was meant to help fix this problem. Abandoning the effort bodes poorly if people who want to ship binaries, this does not include just proprietary software, many, many open source projects also distributes binaries, so if your going to abandon LSB your really setting back and really wiping out a facility for distribution nuetra
Re: WTF? (Score:2)
Your post would be fine except Debian is already dead because of NSA/systemd.
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Google Earth works great for me. OpenSUSE 13.1.
Now if they could just get rid of Perl from "base" (Score:2)
... fortunately Puppy linux can build a working system with debian packages without the standard required and base packages
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Does FreeBSD support the Linux Standard Base?
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FreeBSD uses heir(7) [unix.com] which is analogous to the FHS, and it's this that Debian is retaining support for. The major difference is the lack of libexec in the FHS, the omission being down to some fairly unbelievable politicking way back when.
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It sounds like FreeBSD supports LSB better than certain Linux distros.
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You mean like "sudo pkg install linuxcompat"?
Yeah, wow. That was significant effort!
NOTE: I don't bother with Linux compatibility, so I don't know if that is its package name or not. But the point still stands.
Except, in Debian 8, if the commands you run via sudo call anything in /sbin or /usr/sbin (unless they specify the explicit path) they will fail. Apparently this is for security; apparently it would be dangerous if the root shell you get from sudo had a $PATH that included /sbin or /usr/sbin.
You have to edit sudoers and add the line:
Defaults secure_path="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin"
Debian is getting really annoying.
Re: First systemd, now LSB (Score:2)
Yep. 8 has been total fail in our datacenters.
Virtio issues, broken scripts, utter fail at logging...
We're sticking with 7 until something better comes along.
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http://without-systemd.org/wik... [without-systemd.org]
sadly the problems are not just systemd.
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Yep. I'm waiting for Devuan or another Wheezy Fork to save the day. Let's hope the corporate ass hats can't ruin that too!
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But the real question is can it R/W ext4 filesystems? If it can't handle my filesystems then no gradual transition is possible, and I'm certainly not going to commit myself until I test that all the tools I need are present and working. Which means my actual working system files are going to be in ext4 until after the transition. (Also the backups are in ext4.)
The last time I checked I couldn't find a BSD that could R/W ext4, though, IIRC, there was one that claimed to read it. (Probably by ignoring the
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Systemd is not bad at all really, all of my scripts execute well. Maybe the default settings are not what you need so you just configure some of your own rc style scripts to be run and problem solved. Its not like systemd hs taken away the old startup model, you can use it quite happily under systemd, so I don't know what the problem is. No one is forcing you to use prerequisite based startup in systemd and I do not myself, all systemd is adds additional capability to what is already available.
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A server (running Debian Stable) I was rebooting for a kernel upgrade wouldn't reboot -- it just hung at "Reached target Shutdown" (similar, I believe, to this bug [launchpad.net]). Of course, it had already stopped sshd, so I had no idea what was going on until I dug out a monitor and plugged it in.
Another server had an entry in
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Well, it hasn't driven me back to LILO *yet*. But I sure don't understand why they replaced something reasonably easy to understand with something hopelessly opaque.
I actually preferred Grub over LILO once I got used to it. But that is not clearly true of Grub2.
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When exactly did Red Hat make this mistake and how did they make it? I have been using Red Hat (later Fedora) since Red Hat 5.0 (original RH linux, circa 1997), so it must have been long before then. I cannot recall any such near disaster. RH has initiated many potentially disruptive changes and came out doing just great. The one that was the hardest was the switch to glibc from the old libc. That broke a lot of things initially, and caused a lot of pain for users and developers. But they worked it ou