Debian reconsiders init-system diversity

Posted Nov 13, 2019 23:12 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: Debian reconsiders init-system diversity by rgmoore
Parent article: Debian reconsiders init-system diversity

I think this is an underappreciated part of what people who object to systemd don't like about it. You can argue all you like about the systemd project consisting of a bunch of separate tools that just happen to share a repository, but it is still being developed by a group that coordinates closely and has built its tools to cooperate closely. That's very different from the traditionally anarchic Unix approach, and importantly, that close coordination makes it more difficult for somebody to take just the parts they want and replace the ones they don't.

I don't think that's actually the case. The various pieces of systemd, their interactions and interdependencies are in fact documented quite well (certainly more so than those of other Unix-based tools). I do agree with Lennart elsewhere in this discussion that it's probably not entirely trivial to “replace the ones they don't want” because there's a real risk of reinventing subtle bugs that the official components have fixed a long time ago, and in practice there's likely not a whole lot to be gained from attempting that sort of thing.

In any case I don't think anyone would have objected if the authors of sort, awk, etc. had at some point got together and decided to standardise the names and meanings of their common command-line options. It would definitely have made Unix stronger. So close coordination is not necessarily a bad thing – as a user and educator I would certainly prefer it over gratuitous diversity.