[PATCH 0/3] less: display ANSI colors with option -R

[Rich Felker]

On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 07:16:13AM +0100, Denys Vlasenko wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 9:32 PM, Laurent Bercot
> <ska-dietlibc at skarnet.org> wrote:
> > On 2014-01-23 19:28, Bernhard Reutner-Fischer wrote:
> >>
> >> Fix systemd then.
> >
> >
> >  systemd is broken by design.
> 
> I did not look too deeply into its design.
> Unless there are serious design flaws I am not aware of,
> the idea per se looks sensible.

The idea is not sensible. If I find time I'll write a short article on
why for ewontfix, but it basically amounts to:

1. Crash in pid #1 brings down the whole system, so it's not
acceptable to do anything complex in pid 1.

2. Inability to upgrade all the functionality that's been moved into
systemd without rebooting, due to the inability to kill and restart
pid #1. This cannot be fixed robustly even if systemd execs its own
new version due to certain technical issues (there are cases when it
might fail and thereby bring down the whole system, see point 1).

3. Massive attack surface for a privileged process due to the public
(dbus-based) interface it exposes. This is an unacceptable security
risk.

A lot of the things systemd wants to achieve are correct (e.g. correct
process lifetime management for daemons rather than racy pid files,
clean race-free device insertion and removal handling, ...) but it's
wrong to put them in the init process. They all can (and most already
have) been handled in the past by other modular tools. The latter did
not fail to catch on due to technical deficiencies but due to
extremely conservative distro and admin policies and the lack of a
Poettering-level propaganda machine attempting to force people to
switch.

Rich