[Discuss] Debian officially forked over systemd

[Matthew Gillen]

On 11/29/2014 12:45 PM, Bill Horne wrote:
> Someone, please give me a one-sentence answer I can recite to any suit
> who asks me what the difference is.
> 
> I can't use words like "systemd": their eyes will glaze over. TIA.

Tell them you can tweak old sys-v scripts if they break and/or you need
them to do something new, systemd makes that harder, but on the other
hand has much better mechanisms for handling service dependencies and
parallelism in the startup routine (i.e. faster boot).

I remember the first time I realized how brittle the sys-v system was:
many years ago a misconfigured hostname (didn't match what was in
/etc/hosts, and couldn't be looked up via DNS) caused sendmail to hang
infinitely on startup (to this day I'm not sure why it did that).  Since
sys-v executes everything serially, that prevented bootup from
completing, which prevented the login prompts from ever appearing, etc.
 Luckily sendmail isn't started until runlevel 3, so booting into single
user mode was possible.

A few years later, I had no end of trouble after the introduction of
NetworkManager in getting the system to wait for the network to come up
before starting network-based services like NIS/NFS.  Eventually it got
worked out by the distro, but I never did look into what kind of hack
they had to put in to make it work.

HTH,
Matt