This whole debate saddens me

Posted Nov 29, 2014 22:58 UTC (Sat) by rleigh (guest, #14622)
In reply to: This whole debate saddens me by Wol
Parent article: The "Devuan" Debian fork

Most other init systems are completely portable to other Unix systems because they use nothing but C and POSIX interfaces from libc. sysvinit is portable. It runs today in Debian on the Linux, FreeBSD and Hurd kernels with eglibc. It could undoubtedly run on other kernels and with other libcs such as ulibc.

The initscripts themselves do have some Linux-isms in them; primarily use of /proc which is catered for by linprocfs on FreeBSD and a translator (IIRC) on Hurd. For the scripts which are Linux-only (e.g. udev), that doesn't matter. For the others they could be cleaned up to be more portable if there was a need for that. E.g. I suspect use of /proc/mounts is no longer necessary now mtab has been eliminated; we could use the mount(8) output directly. If we wanted to remove the use of linprocfs and linsysfs, these scripts could be cleaned up just as we removed the bashisms. There hasn't been an realistic need for that, however.

I agree that the unconditional reliance on new features by systemd is a problem. You would have thought they would have the ability and resources to support conditional usage with a fallback, and to be able to test on older systems to make sure the fallbacks work.

This whole debate saddens me

Posted Nov 29, 2014 23:38 UTC (Sat) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (1 responses)

I think one important point though is that sysvinit is only portable to BSD and Hurd as far as those systems have linux compatibility layers, it isn't actually portable to the native APIs of those systems. Portability for applications is the same as it ever was, linux with systemd is just as different as OS X with launchd or Solaris with SMF or even linux with openrc, as much as an application needs to interact with the plumbing

This whole debate saddens me

Posted Nov 29, 2014 23:45 UTC (Sat) by misc (subscriber, #73730) [Link]

In fact, a good post on the topic :

https://teythoon.cryptobitch.de/posts/on-portability-of-i...

This whole debate saddens me

Posted Nov 29, 2014 23:44 UTC (Sat) by misc (subscriber, #73730) [Link]

Sometime, a fallback is not doable.

For example, the audit and containers issues that is discussed another place on this article's comment cannot have a "fall back". Smackd support cannot have a fallback. If kernel or something support is missing for a feature, then you cannot "fallback". Now, you can decide to not use it as a distribution and admins, but that's most of the time out of scope.

And stuff like cgroups did have a fallback ( from 12-04-2011 cfe5a53dc7 to may 2014, ie 3 years )

It is not like there is requirement just to annoy people..