From anti-systemd to pro-systemd in the shortest time

Posted Feb 6, 2014 21:13 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: From anti-systemd to pro-systemd in the shortest time by cdmiller
Parent article: This week in "As the Technical Committee Turns"

Note that a critical bug in systemd's PID 1 will probably be found and removed very quickly, whereas a critical bug in some init script may not even be encountered by most users, may be difficult to reproduce and locate in the code and even more difficult to fix given the circumstances under which init scripts are generally run.

Contrary to popular belief systemd's PID 1 is not a very large program, and it is common to all systemd-using distributions, with a sizeable and active team of developers behind it, while an init script is typically specific to one single distribution and may have just one single maintainer who may have more important things to do with their time than chase other people's obscure bugs. Hence bugs in systemd are much more likely to be fixed than bugs in init scripts for services like BIND, which only even run on a small percentage of machines in the first place.

To quote Mark Twain: Behold the fool saith, »Put not all thine eggs in the one basket« — which is but a manner of saying, »Scatter your money and your attention«; but the wise man saith, »Put all your eggs in the one basket and — watch that basket!«