Poettering: Why systemd?

Yes, but they cannot be easily used to reliably manage all the various daemons etc. on your system without substantial integration effort to make sure that everything ends up in its own cgroup, new tools to manage those cgroups and match them up with the relevant daemons, etc. That's what systemd provides. You can't just say that some software is useless because the new features it provides are based on an already existing kernel API and other software could also potentially be written to provide those same features.

> If the section on dependencies seems confused to you

I understand System V init, but I can't understand what that paragraph in your blog post is saying. AFAICT, you don't like systemd because (1) you think dependencies are important, and (2) serial is just as good as parallel because only end-to-end speed matters. Systemd, of course, provides a much richer (and more reliable, etc.) way of managing dependencies than previous systems, and the whole point of parallel is that it improves end-to-end speed. So I can't reconcile your argument with how any of the stuff being talked about actually works.

> automounter: did you ever see it fail on a live (server) system

Sure, but I've seen tons of things fail on live systems. Hard drives, database servers, network drivers, you name it. There's definitely an interesting discussion to be had here, about the current reliability of the Linux autofs implementation and about its long term prospects for robustness (i.e., after Fedora and SuSE and everyone start pounding on it much more heavily and fixing bugs in the process). But just saying "I have seen this thing fail once and also I am a Serious Person who manages Serious Servers, not like you effete desktop users" is not an argument.

> Nowhere did I claim RH is pushing systemd down anyone's throat

You said that despite systemd's obvious brokenness, it would still be an "arduous fight" to keep it off our systems, because of "Red Hat’s financial backing".