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from the Boot-him?-I-just-met-him! dept.
jbernardo writes:
"Having had several issues with systemd, and really not liking the philosophy behind it, I am looking into alternatives. I really prefer something that follows the Unix philosophy of using small, focused, and independent tools, with a clear interface. Unfortunately, my favourite distro, Arch Linux, is very much pro-systemd, and a discussion of alternatives is liable to get you banned for a month from their forums. There is an effort to support openrc, but it is still in its infancy and without much support.
So, what are the alternatives, besides Gentoo? Preferably binary... I'd rather have something like arch, with quick updates, cutting edge, but I've already used a lot in the past Mandrake, RedHat, SourceMage, Debian, Kubuntu, and so on, so the package format or the package management differences don't scare me."
[ED Note: I'm imagining FreeBSD sitting in the room with the all the Linux distros he mentioned being utterly ignored like Canada in Hetalia.]
(Score: 0) by caseih on Thursday February 27 2014, @01:20PM
But that's just it. You don't have to rewrite daemons to take advantage of systemd. Nor do you have to rewrite any other userspace program. There are features you can take advantage of if you want, like socket activations. I don't really understand your bizarre analogy. Seems an emotional response rather than factual.
But old-school init scripts work just fine, and if you want to take advantage of process supervision and run control (no more hacking with PID files), you just create a service file that runs your daemon in foreground mode (all daemons support this for debugging). In fact while running in debug mode you can turn on full debugging if you want and it's all captured to the log in a nice and usable way. It makes it super easy to drop in third party daemons and just run. In the old days I had to deal with poorly written init scripts that didn't really integrate well with my fedora program, or write my own init script, or punt and stick it in rc.local.
What's ironic is that OS X has been using a systemd-style init system since the beginning and there are many fans of OS X in this community. Somehow launchd is okay but systemd isn't? Come on. Launchd took some getting used to, but it works well. It replaces init, atd, and crond with a nice, easy to use system with simple service definition files.
Why is it that open source people are so quick to jump on the cutting edge (Linux 3.14 FTW), but get all bent out of shape when people try to innovate and actually make things better in user space?
Anyway, this is well past the actual discussion here, but I had to vent a bit even if no one ever reads this.