[sf-lug] SF-LUG met on Sun 2016-05-01 (Several distros on MayDay)

[Rick Moen]

Should have added, for context:

> [1] Although, dear God, some days these people seem like just a Persian
> cat and a monocle away from coming across as Bond villains wanting to
> take over the world.  Just noticed this in Wikipedia's article on
> systemd:  'In August 2015, systemd now provides a login shell, callable
> via machinectl shell.'  Wow, has it's own login shell.  When's it going to
> replace emacs, play Tower of Hanoi, and send and receive e-mail?

In fairness, this bit of bizarreness isn't about desktop computing or
conventional server computing.  It's all about Docker containers and
RHEL Atomic Host (which is basically RHEL 7.2 for Docker containers).
Red Hat, Inc. has put a huge push behind Docker as its cash cow for this
decade, and really has no concern for desktop computing.

'machinectl shell' open an interactive shell session in a container,
generally to run a specified executable with specified arguments.  It
can also open an interactive shell session on the local host directly,
but that's not the real point of it.

It seems like a bit of craziness if you think of systemd as an init, but
the point is that at this point it's _not_ an init exactly, but rather a
huge suite of many diverse tools aspiring to replace huge chunks of
conventional Linux systems, clustered around a cgroups-aware init.