No systemd discussion?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 06:36:36PM +0000, Peter wrote:
> So systemd is causing a lot of grief and panic among seasoned users of
> slackware bare metal init systems, and system V init users. And there is no
> discussion on this on tolug? Okay, I tossed the hot potato into the ring.
> Feelings about systemd and the required adaptation (and, no doubt, teething
> troubles)? I am an older guy who cut his Linux teeth in ~1995 with Slackware
> installed from many floppies and later cds, so I know where I am standing.
> Was it worth the extra trouble to make a daemon do what scripts did fine for
> 40 years?

While I prefer the idea of keeping things simple, I will also agree that
the scripts are not working fine.

The sysv init does not handle restarting things (you have to use respawn
in inittab to do such things and that doesn't work very well with a lot
of things either).

Of course some people even think the BSD init system is functional
(it clearly isn't).

Some of the bits related to systemd (in the same source package) do make
some sense and solve issues that have seemed like they should have been
doable for years but were always a hassle, such as: If I have multiple
displays and I can have multiple USB keyboards and mice, why can't I
have multiple independent X sessions on one machine using that hardware.
There were hacky messy ways to do that before, but apparently with logind
and sessiond and whatever systemd bits are involved, this is apparently
now trivial to get to work.  That's pretty neat.

I am not a fan of XML and don't know why they thought that was the way
to go for the systemd config files, but oh well.

I will not miss inittab at least.

And we have had multiple attempts at making startup parallel using hacks
on top of sysv init, and I think systemd finally dared to say "Don't
try to fix sysv init, replace it".  It has taken me a long time to start
to accept systemd might not be such a bad idea.  I am not impressed
by prior work by some of the people involved, and I am very much not
impressed about how udev got hijacked in without any consideration for
being able to build it without having to build the rest of systemd (it
runs fine separately of course).  That to me is just obnoxious crap on
the part of the systemd developers.  So really the idea seems good,
but some of the ways they have gone about things are causing a ton
of friction.  Breaking the way udev worked with the kernel in some cases
also didn't go well.  I would say some of the systemd developers have
a serious arrogance problem.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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