[Discuss] About to rip out systemd and start over

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

For the umpteenth time, this morning found myself at the console of a dead
Linux box, unable to bring the system up because of unreconciled or circular
or otherwise out-of-sequence dependencies in systemd. An hour and a half
later, during which I had none of the usual tools available to examine the
system (because it wouldn't come up), I just wound up reverting a couple of
tiny edits to dependencies that I'd made in the weeks since last reboot--and
wound up with the same 5-manual-steps restart procedure to get past busted
startup sequencing that I've endured for years.

As archaic as SysV Init is, at least the dependencies are easy to understand:
if you can count from 1 to 99, you can figure out what order things are going
to start up.

Systemd provides several dependency-related directives: Requires, After,
Before, Wants, Conflicts.  Distros and packages don't use numeric prefixes for
defining these directives, so I have gotten completely lost in the chaos of
this-wants-that at system startup.

Systemd does provide a tool that shows a hierarchical display of running
processes (systemd-cgls), but it doesn't do the same thing for its own
configs.  My old distro (OpenSUSE 12.3) doesn't have systemd-analyze so I'm
wondering if that's the tool I'm in desperate need of.  I really need a
"systemd-prove-it-works-before-I-reboot" troubleshooting procedure.  The "dot"
graphviz output doesn't help: it just creates a chart with tens of thousands
of swirly circles.

The bottom line is it looks like I need to carve out a weekend, or a week, to
swap out the distro on which my home-server systems are built. Should I
embrace or toss out systemd when I choose this new platform?

-rich