On 2017-01-01 14:19, David Sommerseth wrote:
> On 01/01/17 01:28, jdow wrote:
>> systemd sucks dead bunnies through garden hoses - chiefly due to nearly
>> totally absent documentation.
>
> Seriously?
>
> $ locate systemd | grep /usr/share/man/ | wc -l
> 145
>
> <https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/#manualsanddocumentationforusersandadministrators>
>
>
> I don't mind flame wars of controversial topics, but let it at least
> start with proper facts ... In my experience, systemd is far better
> documented than any other init system I've used over the last 15+ years
> or so.

Sometimes frustration breeds outbursts. At least I can generally tell which 
pages google coughs up are gold, which are lead, and which are highly 
radioactive, So I worked by way though about a dozen setup issues made worse by 
documentation that was not as clear as it might be, charitably speaking. The 
results are well worth the pain. I'd rather not have had the pain, or at least 
20 dB less pain.

At the level I wanted it the systemd man pages seemed uninformative. When I 
searched on the web it was a pain to put pieces together in a manner that made 
sense. I'd played with it at a "get a test system up" level and as far as I went 
it was fine. It required a LOT of effort to figure out where important data was 
stored.

systemctl unmask firewalld failed. Reinstalling firewalld got it back so I could 
shut up an annoying 32 minute repeat of a message saying it could not be 
started. Something is too dumb to take no for an answer.

I also found that I had no way I could find to tell systemd to bring up a daemon 
as a relatively unprivileged user rather than root. Running some services at 
root privileges makes me nervous even with SELinux in place and active.

Once I learned, by experimentation as much as documentation, systemd is nice 
with some good concepts in it. With better documentation I'd give it an 8 or so 
out of 10 for good. With the documentation, which seemed self-contradictory with 
terms that showed no direct relationship to what they labeled, was more 
obfuscation than clarification. I liken it to, "If you know what you are doing 
the documentation can explain to you what to do." It's like the radio in the '67 
Corvette we had. You had to have the radio out of the car to get at the screws 
you had to remove to get the radio out. (I finally found a very flat offset 
screwdriver and teased the screw out and back in.)

I also noticed with 7.2 there is a general reduction in GUI support for 
configuration. A grump is the (apparent) inability to explain to the famn dool 
thing I like and have gotten used to my dates reading 20170102 - in a nice 
lexically sortable format. A problem is that there is no GUI I found to display 
all loaded services on the machine and whether they are enabled or not and 
whether they are active or not. Only a CLI tool exists, which I like. But, it's 
clumsy for performing survey searches for what's running. And in general 
documentation seems to be slowly going downhill from what I remember from the 
early 2000s. (Those were an improvement over the 1990s.)

So configuring 7.2 has been a king size hassle. On the whole it seems to 
performing the tasks asked of it very well. In that sense it is a very 
worthwhile improvement over 6.x. It's a mixed bag; and, I had to let a little 
gas escape over the state of documentation, even on the online RHEL documentation

(The REAL winge I have is about subversion not being able to drop privilege 
after it starts and run as a user rather than root. That is shameful. And I am a 
tad hesitant to spend the time just now to figure out how to chroot it. And even 
THEN I'd probably try to run it at a user level privilege rather than root. I 
like layered defense.)

As an aside I wonder if anybody alive can really tame SELinux (or MS ACLs) and 
make it something a fairly experienced user/developer could fiddle with.

{^_^}