The "Devuan" Debian fork

Posted Nov 30, 2014 19:31 UTC (Sun) by mgb (guest, #3226)
In reply to: The "Devuan" Debian fork by patrakov
Parent article: The "Devuan" Debian fork

> The [systemd] idea is to tell people to start eliminating dependencies ...

A well-designed dependency-based boot manager might have some value on a laptop but production servers cannot rely on trying to guess all the O(N*2) dependencies between components.

Incidentally, all of our systems - servers, VPSs, laptops, and desktops - have one or more inittab entries to bring up serial consoles, maintenance networks, maintenance sshd, etc. Sysvinit tries them and if something fails it waits and tries again.

They work perfectly precisely because they don't rely on systemd-ish human-error-filled notions of trying to specify exactly which network interfaces and file systems need to be up and mounted.

The "Devuan" Debian fork

Posted Nov 30, 2014 19:41 UTC (Sun) by patrakov (subscriber, #97174) [Link]

In general I agree with your comment, except for the fact that you call the idea of specifying the exact dependencies "systemd-ish". It isn't. It (in the form of LSB headers) predates both systemd and upstart.

And in many contexts (in particular, in clusters where the service depends on something remote) trying and retrying until success is indeed the only working solution. The only possible disagreement here is whether such retrying should be done by the service or by the service manager, but I don't have a strong opinion here.