[TUHS] Version 256 of systemd boasts '42% less Unix philosophy' • The Register

[Kevin Bowling]

On Mon, Jun 24, 2024 at 7:22 AM Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Jun 24, 2024 at 9:51 AM Theodore Ts'o <tytso at mit.edu> wrote:
> >[snip]
> >
> > The bottom line is that while people seem to be ranting and raving
> > about systemd --- and there are a lot of things that are terrible
> > about systemd, don't get me wrong --- I find it interesting that
> > legacy Unix systems get viewed with kind of a rosy-eyed set of glasses
> > in the past, when in fact, the "good old days" weren't necessary all
> > that good --- and there *are* reasons why some engineers have
> > considered plain text ala the 1970's Unix philosophy to not
> > necessarily be the final word in systems design.
>
> I must concur here. To bring this back to history, I think it's useful
> to consider the context in which, "use text, as it's a universal
> interchange format" arose. We _are_ talking about the 1970s here,
> where there was a lot more variation between computers than nowadays;
> back in that era, you still had a lot of word-oriented machines with
> non-power-of-2 word sizes, one's complement machines, and the world
> had not yet coalesced around the 8-bit byte (much of networking is
> _still_ defined in terms of "octets" because of this). In that era,
> yeah, it was just easier to move text between programs: transporting a
> program from a 16-bit machine to a 32-bit machine didn't mean changing
> parsing routines, for example.
>
> Contrast this to today, where things are much more homogenized, even
> between different ISAs. Most ISAs are little endian, and for general
> purpose machines 8 bit bytes, power-of-two integer widths, and 2's
> complement are pretty much universal (I'm aware that there are some
> embedded and special purpose processors --- like some types of DSPs
> --- for which this is not true. But I'm not trying to run Unix on
> those). Furthermore, we have robust serialization formats that allow
> us to move binary data between dissimilar machines in a well-defined
> manner; things like XDR -- dating back almost 40 years now -- paved
> the way for Protobuf and all the rest of them. In this environment,
> the argument for "text first!" isn't as strong as it was in the 70s.
>
> Something that I think also gets lost here is that we also have
> well-defined, text-based serialization formats for structured data.
> Things like sexprs, JSON, have all been employed to good effect here.
> You can have your textual cake and eat your structured data, too!
>
> I think what irks people more is that the traditional, line-oriented
> tools we all know and love are no longer prioritized. But to me that's
> an invitation to ask "why?" The default assumption seems to be that
> the people who don't are just ignorant, or worse, stupid. But could it
> be that they have actual, real-world problems that are not well served
> by those tools?
>
> So it is with systemd. I don't like it, and the recent, "deletes your
> homedir lol you're holding it wrong lmao" thing solidifies that
> opinion, but in some ways it's actually _more_ Unix-y than some of the
> alternatives. Take smf, where nothing screams "UNIX!!!" at me more
> than XML-based config files consumed by giant libraries. Systemd, at
> least, is broken into a bunch of little programs that each do one
> thing (sorta...) well, and it uses somewhat-readable text-based
> configuration files and symlinks.
>
> Indeed, we look at what we consider "real Unix" with some very rosy
> glasses. Perhaps that's why we overlook un-Unix-like functionality
> like Solaris's "profile" facilities, where the kernel does an upcall
> to a userspace daemon to determine what privileges a program should
> have? Or how about the IP management daemon, in.ndpd, or the rest of
> the libipadm.so stuff?
>
> Unix hasn't been Unix for a very long time now.

Apologies if that is too much into the personal taste direction but
using Solaris as an exemplar of anything UNIX is not far removed from
the common opinions of AIX on this list.. It is an awkward culmination
of a lot of money, great multi-faceted marketing spanning several
megacorporations, and from the time of enthusiastic overuse of the
word "enterprise".

Larry and others have described the financial situation that led to
Solaris.  It was a launch salvo of SVR4.. and SVRn had a lot of
expansion(&regression?) in ideology as well as some unfortunate
technicalities that have some relevance to the success of NT
(especially) and Linux than most historians recount.  Knowing that, I
find it understandable when people fondly remember Solaris because it
was cool, had a nice complement of hardware, software, and training
but a little stretched if put on a pedestal.  The thing that put Sun
on the map was SunOS, and that exemplified UNIX.  It is always fun to
"what if" Larry's SourceWare.

>
>         - Dan C.