Comment by cf100clunk
2 days ago
If we look on LFS for its academic merit, I'm saddened that key historical elements of Unix/Linux design are being left behind, much like closing down a wing of a laboratory or museum and telling students that they'll need to whip up their own material to fill in those gaps.
Yes, it's like asking students to actually produce something themselves.
What a horrific thought.
If the students have been well trained, they should be trusted to experiment. If the course curriculum demands that they produce something themselves yet does not educate them on doing so, that's horrific.
Certain things should only be taught as a warning. SysV init is one of them.
Back in the day, system run levels were seen as desirable. SysVinit went in on that concept to the max. So, if the concept of run levels isn't clear to the student beforehand, the init system for making it happen would therefore be mystifying and maybe even inscrutible.
Runlevels may be an interesting idea (e.g. the single-user maintenance level). But a bunch of shell scripts, each complex enough to support different commands, sort-of-declare dependencies, etc, is not such a great idea. A Makefile describing runlevels and service dependencies would be a cleaner design (not necessarily a nicer implementation).
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The old versions of LFS are still available to satisfy your curiosity.
Someone should probably save the required source package versions (and patches) before they disappear though
From the announcement, it saddens them too:
> As a personal note, I do not like this decision. To me LFS is about learning how a system works. Understanding the boot process is a big part of that. systemd is about 1678 "C" files plus many data files. System V is "22" C files plus about 50 short bash scripts and data files.
However the reasoning they provide makes sense.. It's hard to build a Linux system with a desktop these days without Sysd.
Is it? What's the connection between systemd and having a desktop?
Read the article: "The second reason for dropping System V is that packages like GNOME and soon KDE's Plasma are building in requirements that require capabilities in systemd"
> It's hard to build a Linux system with a desktop these days without Sysd.
Most Gentoo Linux desktop users disagree. In fact, OpenRC is the default in that distro.
Having said that, I do expect that Gentoo has more manpower available than LFS.
Maybe they're KDE users. I was under the impression that gnome requires it. FTA it sounds like KDE will soon too. Gentoo doesn't come with a desktop by default either, you have to emerge it, which might install systemd..
FTA: "The second reason for dropping System V is that packages like GNOME and soon KDE's Plasma are building in requirements that require capabilities in systemd"
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LFS never had academic, educational, or pedagogical merit. It was always sheer faith that by doing enough busywork (except the truly difficult stuff), something might rub off. Maybe you learn some names of component parts. Components change.
Could you expand on this comment please? (I don't think your viewpoint should be so rudely dismissed through downvoting and moving on.) What do you mean?