Upstart vs Systemd from Debian Standpoint
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| dba477 May 18, 2015 2:00 AM EDT |
Please, view :- 1. https://wiki.debian.org/Debate/initsystem/systemd 2. https://wiki.debian.org/Debate/initsystem/upstart Section CONS ([2]) sounds like :- Upstart is covered by a copyright license agreement, which contributors must sign to have their contributions included upstream. This is an issue for many Debian developers, who are unwilling to sign such an agreement (usually because of the asymmetry of the agreement in question) and object to core packages being covered by such terms that they will not contribute under. The position of the Debian maintainers is that, while contributions to upstream must be covered by the CLA, no such considerations attach to the Debian package; if Debian ever decides that upstream maintenance is inadequate, we can always fork upstart, since the code itself is GPL. |
| gru May 27, 2015 3:09 PM EDT |
Imagine if Canonical had just given Upstart to the Debian and Ubuntu community at large with no copyright strings attached and promised ongoing support. Debian would surely have adopted Upstart, and the whole Systemd debate would have been radically altered, if not trivial altogether. It always amazes me how Shuttleworth and Co. appear to be addicted to alienating themselves from the FOSS community by trying to act like a proprietary software solutions vendor. This insistence on vendor lock-in on his part was the deciding factor for steering Debian toward Systemd. Case in point: "Upstart was a huge improvement over sysvinit, and Debian should have switched to it years ago. Now that systemd is available and well-tested, however, it cannot sustain the comparison. Upstart suffers from an improper design which replaces dependencies by purely event-driven actions, and its process tracking is implemented using the wrong tool (ptrace). It would be hard work to provide all the features systemd integrates on top of upstart, and its community, <b>limited in size by Canonical’s policy, seems neither willing nor able to develop them.<b>" |
| gru May 27, 2015 3:15 PM EDT |
I wanna be clear though, many of the features on top of Upstart mentioned in the above quote don't NEED to be, and probably SHOULDN'T be included in an init system. Having said that, it is still a shame that a distro as amazing as Ubuntu used to be has been crippled and deformed by its creator. It's like Ubuntu circa 2007 was Anakin Skywalker (young, brash, and full of hope), and Ubuntu circa 2015 is Darth Vader (just an asshole). "He's more machine now than man... twisted and evil." Except comparing Shuttleworth to Palpatine is honestly giving the man too much credit. |
| seatex May 27, 2015 3:21 PM EDT |
> It's like Ubuntu circa 2007 was Anakin Skywalker (young, brash, and full of hope), and Ubuntu circa 2015 is Darth Vader (just an asshole). "He's more machine now than man... twisted and evil." Except comparing Shuttleworth to Palpatine is honestly giving the man too much credit. I was just thinking along those lines yesterday. Remember the "Linux for Human Beings"? Now, it's "Linux for Phones and Corporate Profits". |
| gru May 27, 2015 3:36 PM EDT |
This just kills me every time, particularly the bit about "Ubuntu CDs contain only free software applications; we encourage you to use free and open source software, improve it and pass it on." http://web.archive.org/web/20070705222116/http://www.ubuntu.... |
| seatex May 27, 2015 3:47 PM EDT |
And then a week or so ago, Shuttleworth mixed up a fresh batch of koolaid, asking developers to focus on contributing to HIS "convergence" (phone) priorities. And, he was actually surprised that nobody wanted his koolaid anymore. |
| cybertao May 28, 2015 2:53 AM EDT |
To be fair, Ubuntu distributions still only contain free software applications out of the box. They can't legally distribute patent and licensed software in all jurisdictions. There is a clear trend to get people hooked on their services, as every other company in the world does, and development of their pet projects, but Ubuntu is still as free as it ever was. The only lock-in comes from people utilizing their services and personally liking the environment they develop. Regarding Upstart, someone could have just forked it. Had it been forked, developed, and promoted it might very well have been a suitable candidate to replace sysvinit. Perhaps even filtering upstream to replace Upstart itself or put Upstart downstream of it. It wasn't though. |
| gru May 28, 2015 12:28 PM EDT |
Just looked at the Contributor license agreement, and they've changed it since the Debian init debate (probably as a result).
http://www.ubuntu.com/legal/contributors/licence-agreement-f... I can understand that Canonical wants (needs) to monetize Ubuntu in order to be profitable (they never have been), but their decision to implement a contributor agreement that forced entire distro teams to assign copyright to them for their own code was preposterous. Yes Debian members could have forked Upstart, or any other init system to their liking for that matter, but they didn't want the overhead so they opted for what they perceived at the time as the lesser of two evils. It's a shame that a perfectly adequate and more mature init system had to be killed because of the copyright ambitions of a profit motivated company. Taken from the Upstart Cookbook (http://upstart.ubuntu.com/cookbook/): "In essence, Upstart is an event engine: it creates events, handles the consequences of those events being emitted and starts and stops processes as required. Like the best Unix software, it does this job very well. It is efficient, fast, flexible and reliable. It makes use of "helper" daemons (such as the upstart-udev-bridge and the upstart-socket-bridge) to inject new types of events into the system and react to these events. This design is sensible and clean: the init system itself must not be compromised since if it fails, the kernel panics. Therefore, any functionality which is not considered "core" functionality is farmed out to other daemons." |
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