Hackability

Posted Apr 26, 2012 19:21 UTC (Thu) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129)
In reply to: Hackability by oldtomas
Parent article: Shuttleworth: Quality has a new name

> OTOH, a bunch of more or less well written shell scripts, as Debians SysV init is, is infinitely more hackable than a fuzzball of 100-200 kloc for systemd and its dependencies.
That's just a lie. If you want to compare systemd and sysvinit in a meaningful way, you can't just look at the source code of sysvinit and the init scripts. You also have to include the shell which runs the init scripts and all tools called from therein (i. e. cat, sed, awk and whatnot). And if you do that, it turns out that the sysvinit solution is much, *much*, *MUCH* bigger and definitely less hackable than systemd.

Hackability

Posted Apr 26, 2012 19:33 UTC (Thu) by cdmiller (guest, #2813) [Link] (3 responses)

As one never needs to patch and recompile anything from /bin to hack a work around into an init script, It's your proposed comparison which lacks any pragmatic meaning.

Hackability

Posted Apr 26, 2012 20:26 UTC (Thu) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (1 responses)

I've never needed to recompile systemd either, so what kind of argument is that supposed to be?

Hackability

Posted Apr 28, 2012 20:21 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

In the context of hackability it makes perfect sense; if you never had to recompile then you never did hack systemd. To hack on SysV init you just change a script (and you don't have to recompile bash).

Hackability

Posted Apr 26, 2012 21:21 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Nobody stops you from rewriting a systemd unit file as a sh/bash script if you hit a deficiency in systemd.

Remember, it's fully compatible with SysV init.