I’ve started to adopt Nix devShells to help keep a record of each project’s dependencies.

If Nix is too heavy, the learning curve for tools like asdf-vm and mise is much lower and offers similar benefits.

I really wish there was a good equivalent for Windows.

It is wholly owned by and accountable to the UK Government, so this is at best a partial truth.

libsystem is such a bizarre abstraction covering far too much surface area. The name alone is a code smell. Why is the same library used for both internal service management and for services implementing on-demand launches and notifications?

I like parts of systemd very much: units and their sandboxing/isolation/chroot of processes.

Many other parts are terrible beyond measure: journald for example.

I think the concept of on-demand processes managed by the end manager is a good idea, but systemd is strong arming the services into accepting its philosophy.

What's wrong with journald? I do not know much about it, aside from having to use journalctl to view logs occasionally.

Logs being stored in binary is the main problem, I think.

You can of course copy them into whatever format you want, systemd has support for syslog style export.

Versus the logical dmesg|grep {what you are looking for} or tail -n 30 /var/log/messages.

Tell me you never tried

  journalctl | grep {term}

without telling anything.

Also you are probably never worked with a localised distros. Go try your luck at least on a non-Latin one.

you can just run journalctl -g {term} too lol

That is the systemd way, and what many of us have pointed out for years as a major risk of the approach.

This reads as though your objection is to the scope of systemd rather than its implementation detail, which isn’t where my objection lies.

I have nothing against the service management stack also addressing common principles like logging and on-demand starts a la inetd, but the notion that applications should link against a component of the service manager which is also used by the service manager boggles my tiny mind.

libsystemd is not being used by systemd itself.

I have never seen anybody point to it as a security risk before this happened. Would be happy to see a reference of somebody saying that prior to the xz event

Report is that shortly before the hole was reported, a PR had been posted requesting to remove the dependency on xz.

> Why is the same library used for both internal service management and for services implementing on-demand launches and notifications?

Poettering was a Microsoft fan. I guess he designed SystemD like svchost.

and the fact that it worked and still working means that he was right, also systemd was already fixing the huge dependecies for a while, this only accelerated the process

Totally valid, but FWIW this can be turned off without becoming a supporter: take a look at the source for the settings page for a hint.