Init systems in Debian [LWN.net]

Init systems in Debian

Posted Jan 28, 2013 22:08 UTC (Mon) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)
In reply to: Init systems in Debian by drag
Parent article: Poettering: The Biggest Myths

As stated above, the same argument could be made for desktop environments, text editors, graphical editors, spreadsheets and every other redundant set of programs; not only for kernels. Perhaps you are interested in a distribution that offers just one set of integrated, polished components. That is not Debian in my experience. And that is its strength, despite the burden of development.

As to that burden, I expect that it will not be so difficult to develop for three init systems given that both Upstart and systemd claim to be SysV init-compatible. Even if the script automation script does not work out. I have had to customize init scripts every once in a while, this should not be too different.

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Init systems in Debian

Posted Jan 28, 2013 23:00 UTC (Mon) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]

Various components have support for systemd. Some still fall back to other methods at runtime, some do not. This does add a lot of complexity, potential bugs, etc. I noticed this when Mageia switched to fully systemd in the development version. That just took a few days, because quite easy if the goal is systemd only. If you want to support all, I guess you might need to write some code because not every component (package) compiled with systemd support has that support as a runtime extra feature.

Init systems in Debian

Posted Jan 29, 2013 16:51 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

The goal of the operating system is to make it easier to write and run applications/services. Anything that is done to make those activities more difficult then necessary is full of fail.