Entangled monolith? [was: Re: GR proposed re: choice of init systems]

[Andrei POPESCU]

On Ma, 21 oct 14, 16:55:08, Joel Rees wrote:
> 
> Anyway, if you think about Ric's comment about the movie 2001, well, the
> monolith is not subject to being taken apart and analyzed. Dave's
> interaction with it is pretty much passive. 2001 is a great movie, very
> thought provoking. But I think it encourages a passive attitude towards
> things one doesn't understand.
> 
> I'm not much in favor of that attitude.

Me neither, but at least as far as I'm concerned:

Sysvrc is anything but transparent to me. It consists of a bunch of 
shell scripts that are beyond my understanding. And don't tell me shell 
scripting is easy, I've been following the "bash exorcism" thread on 
-devel and few other references provided on -user (Unix standards 
getting quoting wrong?) and just about anyone agrees that beyond a 
certain size it's much better to rewrite the thing in a real programming 
language.

Systemd unit configuration files are much more understandable for me. 
I've found everything I needed in the manpages and if the behaviour is 
not as documented I know how to file bugs. In comparison initscripts are 
not documented at all except for code comments ("look at the source"? 
when was this ever considered good documentation).

Systemd *is* FLOSS and I'm quite sure that being such a central piece in 
so many distributions has already attracted many eyeballs. Many more 
than your average initscript.

Is systemd (the project) tightly integrated? Yes, nobody is disputing 
this. Is it *too* tightly integrated? Many have argued "yes" and that a 
loosely integrated design would have been better. I'm not even 
disagreeing with this view. However, so far there's no real contender 
for systemd:

Upstart has buried itself from the start (the weird upside-down 
dependency model, the CLA, and the Debian Maintainer's insistence to 
replace sysvinit instead of allowing parallel installation and booting 
with some init= parameter).

OpenRC seems interesting, but it's far from being ready for a 
distribution like Debian. Same with others, like daemontools, runit, 
etc. that are even present in the archive, yet not enough people have 
seriously considered switching to them.

uselessd and nosh are still just starting and both look like one-man 
shows. It's too early to tell if they will be successful or will just 
fade away as most distros switch to systemd and are reasonably happy 
with it.


Kind regards,
Andrei
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