The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Nice writeup! Having used SMF on Solaris 10 for the past six years and systemd on a RHEL 7 server for a few months, I can attest that on Solaris, this kind of init system is a mild annoyance but not a total disaster.

People of different roles being able to work together, I think, is what is really at play here. Until the Debian GR was announced, the idea of consulting stakeholders outside of a relatively small group of insiders appears to have been avoided.

I don't see it as much of a long-term technical matter for server use. As others have pointed out, I would look forward to being being able to log directly to syslog. It sure would be nice to have the default for viewing logs changed to show the entire line instead of abbreviating with "...", too.

In my experience with SMF, though, it doesn't seem to have gotten much reaction either way from users of Solaris. The main difference from the sysadmin perspective being that it makes boot-time troubleshooting a little weirder.

Otherwise, I haven't encountered an SMF manifest being supplied by a piece of software that wasn't written by either Sun or Veritas. As with the current round of systemd-enabled Linux distros, /etc/init.d scripts still work. Even nine years after the release of Solaris 10, they are still what I have seen in standard use on that platform by 3rd party applications and sysadmins. Of course, both generally had to maintain (non-SMF) Solaris 9 configurations for much of that time, just as enterprise Linux server admins will have to maintain older enterprise Linux releases for a number of years.

On the topic of new functionality for Linux, snapper/btrfs looks really nice. Something like LiveUpgrade is what I had been missing after migrating servers from Solaris. :-)