Debian votes on init systems

Posted Dec 7, 2019 18:44 UTC (Sat) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: Debian votes on init systems by mgb
Parent article: Debian votes on init systems

Application developers either depend on no init system or else they attempt to target some kind of lowest common denominator.

Or they can take advantage of systemd features either when they detect that they're running on a systemd-based system, or if the user tells them they're running on systemd (e.g., via a command-line option).

It's a distro wars thing - RedHat's EEE move against competing distros.

How can it be a “distro wars thing” if most distributions now come with systemd as a default, and systemd itself is developed by a diverse community including contributors from various distribution projects? Also various systemd features are patterned on approaches from distributions other than Red Hat's, such as Debian GNU/Linux.

One major advantage of systemd is that it standardises much of the “basic plumbing” of a Linux system. This makes your life easier if you're building a distribution because you don't have to come up with that stuff yourself, and can spend the time you save on other aspects of your work. If you're an application developer, systemd itself isn't as immediately useful but you can still profit from the more homogeneous and predictable system environment on systemd-based distributions that share more of the “basic plumbing” than we were used to in pre-systemd times. This makes it easier for you to offer applications that support a wider variety of Linux distributions with fewer special cases that you need to take into account.