The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

It seems to me the only problem you have really consolekit. And consolekit is a bit of a weird duck because its been a dead upstream now for like 2 years. Do you really expect applications to continue to hold onto support for an unmaintained framework element like CK?

systemd transitioned the boot scripts from shell scripts to declarative syntax because it made things easier to write and more reliable, and hang how hard it made debugging and more complex stuff (as nbrown has mentioned). policykit has transitioned local admin security policy decisions from declarative syntax to, of all things, javascript because this increases flexiblity. Of course, it also means you're giving a JS interpreter that was not written with security in mind powers equivalent to root (!!) and, oh yes, because no backward-compatibility provisions were made, on upgrade you're silently breaking your admin's security policy. Better hope the admin knows JS well enough to hack in replacements fast.

I like using Turing-complete languages for configuration, but holy crap was this ever the wrong language in the wrong place. There's a reason most distros haven't upgraded to the JS-using version.