Who cares?

Posted Dec 17, 2013 21:14 UTC (Tue) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
In reply to: Who cares? by flohoff
Parent article: Which init system for Debian?

>I am a Linux oldtimer and i am in strong oposition of systemd. Its name speaks for itself - it sees itself to be the only attachment point for userspace. Dont have any gods besided me - I'll take care about consoles, booting, network sockets, dbus, udev and whatever it takes to make you feel comfortable.

I'm certainly more comfortable in a well-organized system where services are easy and reliable to start/stop/restart, logging is reliable and includes stdout/stderr from daemons, where creating a new service which may or may not know how to "daemonize" itself is easy and doesn't inherit from or pollute the login session I'm working from. Writing good systemd unit config files is much more straightforward and reliable than the piles of (distribution/platform specific) shell required for SysV init

The Linux kernel is now largely event driven/hotplug when it comes to devices which is why udev and NetworkManager need to exist, to handle and DTRT when those events are emitted. systemd services can have dependancies on devices, for example on the network being up or on a particular filesystem being mounted, or services which start when a particular USB device is inserted, which is why it needs to be aware of the hardware state and is a client of the device manager.

These features and requirements exist in Linux whether you like systemd or not. I don't think there is a benefit in pretending that Linux is a 20+ year old UNIX and refusing to handle the reality of the modern system. Even UNIX doesn't work that way anymore as the other major systems have switched away from SysV init already (Solaris/SMF, MacOSX/launchd for example)