Ron said on Sun, 18 Jan 2026 12:49:53 -0800 >Kent Borg wrote on 2026-01-16 19:44: > >> On 1/16/26 7:05 PM, Rich Pieri wrote: >>> (my opinions about adopting systemd aside) >> >> Always nice to see someone badmouthing systemd, thanks. > >Gonna disagree. > > >What's your solution for services management? Upstart?
There Ron goes again, the False Choice logical fallacy. Services management can be provided by daemontools, runit, s6, nitro, and probably several others. >Why did both Canonical and RedHat develop a services management >system? Because sysvinit sucked. > What problem(s) were they trying to solve? (RedHat included >Upstart briefly before everyone settled on systemd.) Immense and complicated init scripts, and profit motive. > >I know it's "not a very fashionable idea" to push back on "systemd >sucks", but it's 2026, systemd is everywhere, and it works just fine. It works. "Works just fine" is pushing it. First of all: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues Second, to an ever greater degree, systemd makes it very hard to get your computer to do what you want, because it subsumes more and more of what used to be Linux. Third, it's a gargantuan attack surface. Big attack surfaces might be necessary for some things, like a kernel, but they're not necessary, and in fact danger-ridden slapstick comedy, in init systems. >In fact, it's nice to have a small, easy-to-read unit file to describe >"don't start Apache if nginx is running" or "when mailman3 comes up, >bring up mailman3-web, and when mailman3 shuts down, stop mailman3-web >too". Do you seriously think runit and s6 aren't capable of that same thing, just as easily. > >A unit file that works across distributions so developers don't have >to maintain a bunch of inscrutable scripts with tweaks for each OS. So do runit and s6 run files. Portable is easy when you're simple. >Then there's the resource constraints that can be easily enforced via >unit files. Linux already had most of these. And we live in an age of containers and VMs where each virtual computer can have its own allocated RAM, processor speed, number of cores, and diskspace. And if I had a reason to do so, I could write a daemon that would do this, without VMs or containers, on a per process basis. >Give a reason for "badmouthing" systemd other than "old man shakes >fist at sky" please. Here we have the Appeal to Novelty logical fallacy: Old men are anti-complexity. I think the correct statement would be: Smart people are anti-complexity. SteveT Steve Litt http://444domains.com _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
