kai-tub (u/kai-tub) - Readit News

kai-tub commented on Show HN: Interactive systemd – a better way to work with systemd units isd-project.github.io/isd... · Posted by u/kai-tub

alduin32 · a year ago

This is amazing, I had a bunch of work to do on some remote hosts this night and tried using isd as much as possible, to see how it can help me.

Some feedback :

- it is.. relatively slow ? especially when focusing on different panes (tab/shift+tab). on my machine it takes at least half a second to react

- the unit list is missing page-up/page-down handling

- in some unit attributes, the ordering of some values frequently changes (for example, on unstarted services, in `TriggeredBy`)

- it could be interesting to integrate the output of `systemd-analyse security`

Nice work !

kai-tub · a year ago

- That the tab pane switching is the slow part is a bit weird. Is there a difference when you see all units and a subset of units? Maybe open an issue and I can provide more possible settings that could be changed.

- Jep, page up/down handling will be added. Thanks!

- Not quite sure when this happens. Maybe an example screen shot (before/after) could help?

- Yeah, that is definitely on the roadmap.

kai-tub commented on Show HN: Interactive systemd – a better way to work with systemd units isd-project.github.io/isd... · Posted by u/kai-tub

willm · a year ago

Nice! How did you find working with the Textual library?

kai-tub · a year ago

It was great! The extensive documentation and the vast amount of widgets were definitely the main reasons why I have chosen to do it in Python/Textual rather than other languages/libraries.

Though I don't agree with all design decisions, and there are some bugs, having such well-maintained documentation and clean repo makes it easy to dive into the project and understand what is going on and how other components are built.

Thanks for the library!

kai-tub commented on Show HN: Interactive systemd – a better way to work with systemd units isd-project.github.io/isd... · Posted by u/kai-tub

airstrike · a year ago

This looks super well done and polished. The rich docs are crazy detailed for something that was just released. You're really setting the bar for what other projects should do. Congrats!

kai-tub · a year ago

Thanks!

I've put quite a lot of work into it and wanted the project to give a good first impression. This was important to me since I believe these "niche" TUI libraries need to immediately show what problems they are solving or how they save time, as users need a reason to _use_ an additional abstraction layer.

kai-tub commented on Show HN: Interactive systemd – a better way to work with systemd units isd-project.github.io/isd... · Posted by u/kai-tub

mahoro · a year ago

So cool that with uv it becomes so easy to install such tools.

What's missing in the install routine is uv installing this tool ignoring the Python dependency. My box has 3.10 and isd won't work with it. Fixed with `-p 3.13` option. May be worth mention in the docs.

kai-tub · a year ago

Hey, thanks for mentioning this! I have included the flag in the docs.

kai-tub commented on Show HN: Interactive systemd – a better way to work with systemd units isd-project.github.io/isd... · Posted by u/kai-tub

elric · a year ago

Looks great, well done. It's a shame that it's needed at all. The vast majority of my interactions with systemd are trivial: (re)starting a service, looking at a log file to figure out what's wrong, and making sure a service starts on boot. I find it baffling that the ergonomics of systemd for those common tasks are so lacking. But the TUI seems to help, so thanks.

And sure, systemd it's more deterministic and includes the kitchen sink, unlike initd.

Thankfully these days I can automate most of such interactions out of existence, so I no longer feel the burning hatred that I once did. More like a smoldering ember.

kai-tub · a year ago

I mean, I get why they don't want to "bloat" systemd with a complex/opinionated TUI, but I would've also really liked a more "upstreamed" interface. Though, I guess making systemd more beginner-friendly/accessible is not really that important for their funding?

kai-tub commented on Show HN: Interactive systemd – a better way to work with systemd units isd-project.github.io/isd... · Posted by u/kai-tub

jonwest · a year ago

Maybe a bit of a gross simplification, but would you say this is analogous to something like k9s for Kubernetes? It looks handy, to say the least.

kai-tub · a year ago

I have never used or touched k9s nor Kubernetes, so... Maybe?

kai-tub commented on Show HN: Interactive systemd – a better way to work with systemd units isd-project.github.io/isd... · Posted by u/kai-tub

jchw · a year ago

> If you have nix installed, this AppImage will not work! Either use the nix or uv installation instructions!

Is this really true? I understand why it does not work on NixOS (I tried just out of curiosity and it seems like it is unable to exec the host systemctl for some reason) but I don't think there's any reason it wouldn't work on other OSes that merely have Nix installed.

Interestingly though, on Nix v2.24.11, I can't use the provided Nix command either:

    $ nix run https://github.com/isd-project/isd
    error:
           … while fetching the input 'https://github.com/isd-project/isd'
    
           error: Failed to open archive (Unrecognized archive format)

Even if that did work (you could adjust it into a Git URL to make it work) it would probably not be ideal since Nix has a native GitHub fetcher that is more efficient. I think this should be the actual Nix command:

    nix run github:isd-project/isd

Anyway, this is cool. I actually wanted to make a similar thing using systemd's DBus API and Qt instead of a TUI and even started writing code for it, and if you wanted to I'm sure you'd find that the DBus API probably provides all of the functionality you would need (admittedly it is a lot easier to just call `systemd -H` than to implement your own SSH tunneling, though.) It kind of frustrates me that systemd and modern Linux in general is absolutely teeming with data and interfaces that could be exposed and make administering systems, especially desktop systems that were traditionally very inscrutable, much easier. e.g. in the past, how did you know what was going on when an xdg autostart app failed? Now with systemd running xdg autostart apps in some desktops, it would be really easy to provide a GUI that can show you the failed autostarts and even provide a GUI log viewer, and yet somehow, such a tool does not seem to exist, at least in the realm of things that are maintained and relatively feature-complete. Rather frustrating.

kai-tub · a year ago

> Is this really true? I understand why it does not work on NixOS (I tried just out of curiosity and it seems like it is unable to exec the host systemctl for some reason) but I don't think there's any reason it wouldn't work on other OSes that merely have Nix installed.

Yeah, it get's complicated and I don't want to recommend it and explain the details. In short, I am creating the AppImage via nix. And the AppImage "mounts" (not overlays!) the AppImage's /nix/ directory. So calls from the TUI that would access /nix/ wouldn't go to the systems `/nix` directory, which leads to all kind of weird issues. For example, you could install your EDITOR via home-manager on Ubuntu. isd would start correctly because systemctl is "accessible" but if you open your EDITOR under `/nix` it wouldn't find it, which is super confusing as a user. -> So it is just easier to say to use the nix installation method if you are already using it :D

And sorry for the wrong docs, it is fixed now.

I also agree with your frustration. Personally, I would really enjoy working on such a tool but it wouldn't be an easy task, and who would support the work? This TUI had a manageable scope but it was still quite a bit of work. So I don't see myself investing too much into "higher-level interfaces".

PS: I have no idea why your post is ill-received :/

kai-tub commented on Show HN: Interactive systemd – a better way to work with systemd units isd-project.github.io/isd... · Posted by u/kai-tub

alpb · a year ago

Why have you picked Python for this project? I feel like Rust/Go have better TUI ecosystems and the ability to use native bindings.

kai-tub · a year ago

Hey, mostly because the underlying TUI framework (textual) is _amazing_.

Not gonna lie, I am not a big fan of Python anymore because of the dependency hell you can run into when working with CUDA libraries but uv is a breath of fresh air and textual is just sooo easy.

Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that I would never consider rewriting it in Rust or Go, but the documentation and guides from Textual were great resources and the creator, Will, also seems like a really nice guy :D

Edit: To be explicit, I believe that Python has currently the most advanced and accessible TUI ecosystem. At least, that was my impression after checking a few examples on an afternoon.

kai-tub commented on Show HN: Interactive systemd – a better way to work with systemd units isd-project.github.io/isd... · Posted by u/kai-tub

renewiltord · a year ago

Haha this is great. It’s funny that others also end up doing this enable, start, journalctl, start dance. Good stuff. I shall try it.

My only problem is that I wish there were a way to install it on my machine and have it connect to a remote systemctl but that probably is a lot of work to reliably work (port may not be open etc etc).

kai-tub · a year ago

Maybe it is possible with `systemctl --host`... Though, I would have to make quite a few changes to the UI design since it would mean that there are "multiple modes". One for local and multiple remotes. So... Check back in a month or so :D

kai-tub commented on Show HN: Interactive systemd – a better way to work with systemd units isd-project.github.io/isd... · Posted by u/kai-tub

diggan · a year ago

> Dang. I have never heard of `systemctl --host`. Sadly not. It is more or less a fancy wrapper around (the local) `systemctl`.

Sounds like you could easily support it by letting users pass in $REMOTE_HOST and when you use your `systemctl` wrapper, add `$CMD --host=$REMOTE_HOST`, after that everything should work as before.

kai-tub · a year ago

I will investigate it!

https://github.com/isd-project/isd/issues/6