Story

I started out in Unix in the very early 1980s. I was drawn to it because of the toolbox approach and the readability of the configs and startup scripts. I started with BSD 4.2 on PDP 11s, then dualport OSX from Pyramid, followed by some Xenix and Suns running SunOS 3.x (BSD based). Over the years I have worked with pretty much every flavor of Unix, BSD, or GNU/Linux you can think of. Most of them were simple to deal with when moving from one to the other because the configs and startups were readable by anyone with even moderate skill in the art. I could teach a newbie how to understand the startup system and troubleshoot startup problems in very short order.

At some point commercial Unix vendors decided to "make things easier" and we started to get things like SCO Unix overwriting startup files and configs from it's GUI admin tool. It stored stuff in a private DB and just over wrote changes put in files by hand. NOT GOOD. Then of course with Solaris 10, which brought us the great ZFS, Sun decided to go to a monolithic startup database, which if corrupt means the system will not boot. Other commercial vendors have done similar stupid things over the last 10 years.

I think if the Debian core team wants to go against 30+ years of good solid proven engineering then they need to find a surgeon to give them a Rectal craniotomy.

If non-systems administrators can not figure out how to administer a system who the hell cares? Every time I have been called in by startups where the programmers tried to develop code and figure out system administration as well as design how the programs interact with the system it has been a total FUBAR.

The problem these days is everyone who has walked past a computer thinks they are a systems administrator or systems engineer, and vendors as well as, it appears, Team Debian , are feeding that fantasy and in the process destroying the versatility, agility, and maintainability of current POSIX systems. It is exactly this kind of stupidity that makes it more difficult all the time to properly administer systems as well as move between POSIX systems from different vendors.

JUST SAY NO TO FORCED INIT SYSTEM CHANGES.