On 4/28/19 11:03 AM, Konstantin Olchanski wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 27, 2019 at 02:15:42PM +0200, Maarten wrote:
>> Hello fellow SL users,
>> I having been using SL for a while now, ...
>> there will be no SL8...
>> the future [?]
> 
> 
> I look at the future throught the mirror of today's problems.
> 
> And today's problems in the RH/CentOS/SL universe do not project a bright
> sunny future:
> 
> - systemd is a mess up. with luck IBM's purchase will clean house on this one.

I'm pretty sure any chance of systemd being replaced any time soon is 
vanishingly small.  Embrace it, file bugs, move on with life.

> - c++, cmake, python, php, etc are always 1-2 versions behind those required by packages we need to use

This has been a problem inherent with "Enterprise" distributions that 
value stability over new features.  That said, I've found that RHEL7 has 
been much more aggressive with updates (sometimes annoyingly so) that 
EL6 was.  Also, with modules in EL8 hopefully this will be much better.

> - ZFS is not part of the base system, does not play well with kernel updates
> - NIS will be removed in el8, with no replacement (LDAP need not apply unless they sorted out handling of autofs maps)

NIS, seriously?  FWIW - I use autofs with LDAP (by way of IPA) 
extensively without issue.

> - incoming mess up of X11 via Wayland graphics

This does not seem tied to any one particular distribution, unless there 
are some trying to avoid Wayland altogether? Though I can't imagine that 
being viable for long.

> On the data analysis side we are married to CERN via the ROOT data analysis package,
> and the vibes I get from ROOT developers is that CERN Linux 7 (CentOS7) is not their
> primary target. (for example we had a problem with ROOT graphics where ROOT's LLVM collided
> with LLVM inside the el7 OpenGL library. For sure, Mesa has it fixed "in the latest version",
> but for us running vanilla CentOS7, nothing worked. And still does not work, the best I know).
> 
> So it looks like we will be looking at Linuxes other than RH/CentOS, especially
> if a popular systemd-free variant somehow emerges. A move to Ubuntu is quite likely
> just because it tends to have recently recent c++, python, php & co.
> 
> 
> P.S. What's the beef with systemd? Apart from sundry bugs (for example, sometimes
> it does not respect the startup order specified in the unit files), we have been
> forced to disable all automatic updates (usually a nightly cron job). This is
> because an update of the systemd package triggers/forces the restart of every
> system service (nis, nfs, autofs, etc), effectively a reboot of the machine
> (minus rebooting of the linux kernel). Not a nice thing to happen on production
> machines on random nights whenever updated systemd is pushed out (usally 2-3 times a year).
> Of course in our experience, about 50% of the time something goes wrong and one of the services
> restarted by the systemd update does not restart correctly yielding a dead machine.
> Rant over.

I run with automatic updates and have never seen a systemd update force 
a restart of every system service.

-- 
Orion Poplawski
Manager of NWRA Technical Systems          720-772-5637
NWRA, Boulder/CoRA Office             FAX: 303-415-9702
3380 Mitchell Lane                       [log in to unmask]
Boulder, CO 80301                 https://www.nwra.com/