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.
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
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).
On the contrary, I much prefer a full Turing complete language rather than trying to shoehorn my ideas into someone else's limited system.
The scripts don't have to be complicated, and it doesn't have to be shell scripts. You can use any script or executable that the Linux kernel can load and run. But shell scripts work great and have all the power needed.
Systemd is a giant, flaming heap of buggy ass code. Good riddance to it.
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.
> 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"
> I was under the impression that gnome requires it.
It doesn't seem to require it at this moment. I have "-systemd" in my USE flags, and have neither sys-apps/systemd nor gnome-base/gnome currently installed. After enabling several USE flags that have nothing to do with systemd [0], emerge was quite happy to offer to install gnome-base/gnome and its dependencies, and absolutely did not offer to install systemd.
Honestly, I don't even know if GNOME has a hard dependency on Wayland... I see many of the dependent packages in the 'gnome-*' categories have an "X" USE flag. I CBA to investigate, though.
Is KDE Plasma building in hard systemd requirements, or is it just building in hard Wayland requirements? I'd known about the latter [1] and -because I'd thought it was important to the KDE folks that KDE runs on BSD- would be surprised if they irreversibly tethered themselves to systemd.
[0] introspection pulseaudio vala server screencast wayland theora eds egl gles2
[1] Though do note that the same blog post that announced the change in policy for Plasma also announced that no other KDE software was going to have a hard dependency on Wayland for the foreseeable future.
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"
If GNOME and KDE were the only desktop solutions, your ''Read the article'' comment would be sensible.
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?