[kwlug-disc] What is all this about systemd?

[Chris Irwin]

On Tue, Sep 2, 2014 at 2:55 PM, Khalid Baheyeldin <kb at 2bits.com> wrote:

> Lennart Poettering, systemd developer, outlines what he (and others in the
> systemd cabal) see as wrong with Linux distros, and what they propose to
> fix it.
>
> They totally miss that packaging has been a solved problem for ages (since
> .deb was invented), and that centralized repositories have existed for over
> a decade (Debian, Ubuntu).
>

They mentioned deb, rpm and distro repositories in the second paragraph. He
even says "For a variety of uses this is a fantastic scheme: users have a
large selection of readily packaged software available, in mostly uniform
packaging, from a single source they can trust."

Moving on, their arguments of trying to get an upstream-to-user channel
don't sound too crazy. I recently wanted to update LibreOffice. On their
website, they have Windows, OSX 32 and 64, Linux 32 and 64 in both rpm and
deb. Great that they've got packages, but it's four different downloads,
that then need to be untar'd, the `yum install *rpm`. And it doesn't even
provide updates. Try walking a user through that. Or tell the user to cross
their fingers that somebody will have the time to package it (or even
better: Just wait, Ubuntu 14.10 will have it).

Similarly, Java is 32 or 64 in both rpm and tar files (no deb). Out of luck
for Debian/Ubuntu. But luckily, somebody will have duplicated the effort of
re-packing java into one of Ubuntu's repos somewhere, and hopefully they
don't lag too far behind upstream.

Chrome has the same selection as Libreoffice, but *does* provide updates
once installed.

This has been an ongoing discussion topic for years. Ubuntu's solution is
their store: Essentially vendor PPAs that only work for Ubuntu. What if
Fedora had their own store? Suse, Arch, etc? How many upstreams can
properly support that many distros and package systems. That's just putting
them back into the same boat they are now: How many distros can you package
for, and at what niche-level do you not care about users anymore?

There's also the entire eco-system of user-run PPAs to get up-to-date
software. You've got PPAs of "up-to-date chromium by some guy" that hasn't
been updated in a year, ditto for gnome, etc. I'm even using the equivilant
on Fedora: rhughes gnome-3.12 copr. I generally like COPR/PPAs, and I've
even repackaged software myself, but there should be something in-between
having to compile or re-pack tarballs and depending on some third party to
package things nicely.

Some of their ideas are pretty cool, too. Using btrfs dedup to provide a
32/64-bit hybrid OS and app bundles is pretty clever. Snapshots for
version-rollbacks is nice, too. I've been using btrfs snapshots before yum
updates, but it would be neat to roll back only a specific app.

The only issue I see, and this is a problem also in OSX/Windows/Android, is
how libraries are handled. If libraries are part of the bundle, then
updates (particularly security updates) become a pain. If they aren't, you
lose some of the containerization that makes this such a great win for
upstreams. I'm sure further discussion will follow.

-- 
Chris Irwin
<chris at chrisirwin.ca>
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