The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Many people don't seem to find systemd compelling but they're still outraged that portability isn't an important goal of the project so it won't run everywhere right off the bat. This is a bit incongruous to say the least.

From what we hear, systemd does have lots of features that are interesting to many people – from embedded-system developers to server admins. Fast boot times are nice to have and systemd seems to work well in that area, but systemd is not just about fast boot times; they are a fringe benefit of the approach systemd takes for service activation. (Incidentally, even on servers, people who deal with on-demand virtual machines seem to appreciate a faster boot process, so it is incorrect to claim that boot times are irrelevant to servers.)

Of course anybody may feel free not to be interested in systemd's features, which is why systemd is not mandatory to run Linux, and is unlikely to ever be that way as long as those not interested in systemd are willing to put in the work to maintain a systemd-free Linux distribution (if nobody else does). Whether other people – such as upstream developers who would like to avail themselves of systemd's features – will bend over backwards to make it easy for them is of course up to those people. Then you get people like the Debian developers, who on the whole seem to be happy with the concept of supporting several init systems (in particular, sysvinit and systemd) at the same time as long as this is dealt with in the usual way (i.e., by means of wishlist bugs, preferably with patches attached) rather than mandated by GR. This means that if you do notice a regression or performance hit to something you are interested in, the first step towards getting that fixed is to submit a bug report. Crowing about it on an unrelated web site doesn't solve your problem, either.