[Discuss] SysVinit vs. systemd

[bill.n1vux at gmail.com (Bill Ricker)]

> 1. The major advertised advantage seems to be boot time. Well, my way of
> starting up involves turning on the computer and then looking for my
> glasses. ...

:-)
Agreed. Even though my laptop boots not suspends, it's good enough now.

And until recently, we prided ourselves on our average uptime, so boot
time of servers was irrelevant. (This meant we weren't patching our
servers, uh oh.)

But in the brave new virtualized world, startup time of VMs is
becoming important figure of merit.


> 2. Another advantage seems to be the ability to lazy load services.

interesting in theory

> 3. While shell script seems kryptonite ... I'm now coming
> around, finally, to appreciate sh for scripts. A small C init that hands
> off to a bunch of shell script strikes me as almost exactly the right
> design for my purposes.

Agreed !

> I figured I hated it and wanted a free system with all scripts in Perl,
> Common Lisp, or Scheme. So he and I are walking in exactly opposite
> directions on that issue.

Agreed.
(Having used SioD to add macro capability to a legacy app ... yeah, agreed.)

(Shuttleworth was trying to do that with Python in Ubuntu. I can
grudgingly accept his choice of Python over Perl for spanning Config
through VB level simple gui programming. Config/init files need to be
editable by people who don't use Code Editors daily, just be reading a
FAQ.  Not that i had a choice. Still a little worried about someone
insterting tab-space-tab in Init files that way though ! )

> 4. I'm a little curious about the issue brought up about properly
> shutting down processes, tracking pids across double forking, etc.  Yet
> this is also not a problem I was aware I had.  I don't normally stop
> daemons except at shutdown,

Having seen bad pid tracking cause problems on a commercial SYS V Unix
system, I'm pleased *someone* is looking at this. One run-as-root
service re-killed a hung pid of its ... not realizing another
run-as-root service was spinning up new pids so fast it had reused the
pid. Oops.Centralized shutdown service *might* help there.

> 5. I'm yet to see anyone convincingly defend systemd.

I may have to read the Debian debate wiki that i linked upthread to
see if there is something convincing there ...

> but the "myths debunked" always read as
> bald face advocacy,

I guess programmers are human.

>  I must say I was thoroughly unimpressed with OpenSUSE,
> though I don't know how much systemd was to blame for that.

I'd want to compare same distro A/B and not drag a new-to-me distro
into comparison.

> 6. I'm not a huge fan of the C language.

+1 !

> At the same time I want to read
> the source code of the operating system I use. This means my preference
> is that, as computers get faster, Perl, shell, Lisp, maybe Smalltalk, in
> a pinch, Python, and maybe ML or Haskell occupy more and more territory
> that previously was held by C.

Right on. (That was Ubuntu's intention, as noted above.)
While I can read C as well as anyone, spent enough time writing it, I
don't trust it to say what it means, and it takes too long to say
anything.

> Systemd goes exactly the opposite
> direction.

Right.

> GNU dmd, on the other hand, interests me, though there seems
> not a lot to it so far (which perhaps is a good thing).

Hmm. Interesting. Yes, small might be good.
Are any Distros including dmd with/instead of rc/init/... ?

> 7. It's obnoxious to me that OpenBSD people that want to run Gnome
> (mtier particularly) have to take time to write shims to substitute for
> systemd. This is as much or more a problem with the Gnome project than
> systemd, I guess.

Lots of issues there. At least they *can* shim.

(SystemD using Control Groups ... which is a GOOD thing in
isolation... does hurt portability, ties it to Linux Kernel,
unless/until the other Kernels adopt them. Which might be a good
thing, irrespective of the Init controversy?)

-- 
Bill Ricker
bill.n1vux at gmail.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/n1vux