Distributors ponder a systemd change

Posted Jun 7, 2016 23:58 UTC (Tue) by JoeBuck (guest, #2330)
Parent article: Distributors ponder a systemd change

Distros can (and will) change the default back to "don't kill" until other packages are updated as needed.

At minimum, GNU screen has to be able to persist after logout; as a software developer I rely on that feature to deal with loss of network connectivity. Likewise, background compute jobs have to work.

I don't think it is "insane" to consider this change, or even to try to push it to create pressure for other packages to live in a world where there are restrictions on background processes after logout. But this is why it is good that the distros sit between the upstream and the end users; the change can only be delivered after the use cases are worked out in detail.

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Distributors ponder a systemd change

Posted Jun 9, 2016 22:44 UTC (Thu) by jeff@uclinux.org (guest, #8024) [Link] (2 responses)

"Distros can (and will) change the default back to "don't kill" until other packages are updated as needed."

No, this breaks the expectations of the POSIX C runtime environment. If I write code to run on a supposedly compliant system by managing signals myself, I absolutely require that to work.

Someone with quite a bit of experience is noted for saying something like "UNIX doesn't have all the good ideas, just most of them". I rely on correct behaviour of signals, they were a good idea, and linking with some dumbass library to get behaviour I had before does not qualify as rational, let alone a good idea.

Fail.

Distributors ponder a systemd change

Posted Jun 9, 2016 23:09 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

In other words: "I've been driving down this road for the last 50 years and I don't care if you say there's a sinkhole ahead!"

Distributors ponder a systemd change

Posted Jun 16, 2016 16:12 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> Someone with quite a bit of experience is noted for saying something like "UNIX doesn't have all the good ideas, just most of them".

Well, as someone with quite a bit of non-Unix experience (and no, that's not just Microsoft), ime Unix/linux has quite of lot of stupid ideas too. And given Linus' attitude of "We're posix compliant if posix makes sense", he probably thinks the same.

Simple example - "cp a b". What's that going to do? Oh, and I don't want a long winded answer with a load of "if"s in it :-)

Whereas on Pr1mos, "copy a b" gives me an exact copy of a (security permissions permitting) called b.

And ime, most of these comments seem to be bikeshedding between two camps - the "sooner the better" camp, and the "the right time is never" camp. If it's going to happen, then now is as good a time as any. How long has this change been in the works? Since the dawn of systemd? And if all these programs - screen, tmux, nohup, haven't done anything about it yet, then they're not going to unless something gives them a kick up the bum.

Cheers,
Wol