Positions forming in the Debian init system discussion

Positions forming in the Debian init system discussion

Posted Jan 16, 2014 18:24 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: Positions forming in the Debian init system discussion by oldtomas
Parent article: Positions forming in the Debian init system discussion

Of course, one could use inittab for daemons under Linux too, but the point is that it was customary in the mid-90's to shepherd system daemons this way, thus potentially controlling their run status and their stdin/stdout/stderr and reacting to their termination via signals.

The most obvious problems with this are that starting daemons via /etc/inittab doesn't give you service ordering even in the clumsy way SysV init does (so no making sure Apache only starts when syslogd and MySQL are already running), and that there is no provision on the part of init for actually dealing usefully with a daemon's stdin/stdout/stderr, which Unix-style daemons customarily close when they start, anyway (and that convention is older than the mid-90s). There's a reason why SysV init works like it does.

This of course completely disregards the fact that systemd does many other useful things even when it is simply starting service processes based on a »runlevel-like« target (leaving aside obvious nifty things like socket activation). All of this would have to be retrofitted into the SysV init infrastructure and would only make that more convoluted and non-standard.

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