sysvinit was a dead end (Score: 4, Insightful) by mth@pipedot.org on 2014-08-14 00:53 (#3VA) I'm not a big fan of systemd, but I disagree with the idea that sysvinit didn't need replacement.It required a large amount of boilerplate in the service start/stop script, which was different between distros, making it a lot of work to provide a decent start/stop script for your daemon. The hard work of distro maintainers hid this nuisance from most end users though.Ordering the service startup sequence by manually assigning priorities to them (S80myservice) instead of using dependencies is a terrible hack. It also prevents services from being started in parallel, which is a pity on today's multi-core systems. It's like building your code using a shell script instead of a Makefile.There is no consistency in how services are started: inittab can respawn, init.d scripts can query the service status (on some distros!), (x)inetd can start services on demand, but all have different configurations.I have some doubts systemd is the right solution to these problems, but at least there is movement now. In my opinion, the solution would be to improve systemd or replace it with something better, not going back to sysvinit. Re: sysvinit was a dead end (Score: 1) by nightsky30@pipedot.org on 2014-08-14 12:00 (#3VD) I agree, the road ahead may be a little bumpy, but the movement forward is better than ending back at where we started. That service startup sequence was a pain in the ass. Re: sysvinit was a dead end (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on 2014-08-14 13:18 (#3VE) I agree that we can do better than init for machines destined for desktop use: I'm a big Linux fan but I also appreciate the fast start-up time of my chromebook and my Mac, and Linux and BSD are both much slower. On servers though, I'd like to keep init, thank you very much - it's slow but I only reboot every six months or so, and in the meantime the clear, understandable, human-readable init scripts are lovely.Maybe this is a more useful argument/discussion when we are careful to separate out Linux on the server vs Linux on the desktop?
Re: sysvinit was a dead end (Score: 1) by nightsky30@pipedot.org on 2014-08-14 12:00 (#3VD) I agree, the road ahead may be a little bumpy, but the movement forward is better than ending back at where we started. That service startup sequence was a pain in the ass. Re: sysvinit was a dead end (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on 2014-08-14 13:18 (#3VE) I agree that we can do better than init for machines destined for desktop use: I'm a big Linux fan but I also appreciate the fast start-up time of my chromebook and my Mac, and Linux and BSD are both much slower. On servers though, I'd like to keep init, thank you very much - it's slow but I only reboot every six months or so, and in the meantime the clear, understandable, human-readable init scripts are lovely.Maybe this is a more useful argument/discussion when we are careful to separate out Linux on the server vs Linux on the desktop?
Re: sysvinit was a dead end (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on 2014-08-14 13:18 (#3VE) I agree that we can do better than init for machines destined for desktop use: I'm a big Linux fan but I also appreciate the fast start-up time of my chromebook and my Mac, and Linux and BSD are both much slower. On servers though, I'd like to keep init, thank you very much - it's slow but I only reboot every six months or so, and in the meantime the clear, understandable, human-readable init scripts are lovely.Maybe this is a more useful argument/discussion when we are careful to separate out Linux on the server vs Linux on the desktop?