Re:Ubuntu 16.04 Unity 8 current state [video]
by bitwize on Thursday December 29, 2016 @08:45PM
(#13281893)
I hate sysvinit, but the init binary itself is quite small and cruft-free. It's the /etc/rcN.d stuff that has all the cruft. This boggled my mind (and got me hacked) when I came off Slackware, where I'm used to fine-tuning service access by tweaking a shell script or two.
Had systemd been a framework like runit, which nicely combines Unix primitives into an easy-to-use and featureful framework, I wouldn't whinge so much about it. But its design is monolithic (despite having 60-odd binaries, they all mutually and tightly depend on one another), its code is not that great and it's basically an inner platform in its own right. And all that isn't necessary to achieve the goals of dependency-based startup, process isolation, etc.
Sendmail belongs in the dustbin of history. But its replacements, like qmail and exim, preserved its spirit while fixing its deficiencies. Thus it is with init and runit. The current environment does not favor keeping the spirit of the past alive, but burning it to the ground and erasing it from memory. And when serious deficiencies are found in the new hotness, the answer is to burn that to the ground too. I blame the GNOME project, whose manifesto was called "Let's Make Unix Not Suck"; Unix not sucking involved writing a Windows-like inner platform and encouraging or coercing developers to target that instead. Famously, GNOME has undergone at least two slash-and-burn cycles and its latest installation is known for its instability.
Had systemd been a framework like runit, which nicely combines Unix primitives into an easy-to-use and featureful framework, I wouldn't whinge so much about it. But its design is monolithic (despite having 60-odd binaries, they all mutually and tightly depend on one another), its code is not that great and it's basically an inner platform in its own right. And all that isn't necessary to achieve the goals of dependency-based startup, process isolation, etc.
Sendmail belongs in the dustbin of history. But its replacements, like qmail and exim, preserved its spirit while fixing its deficiencies. Thus it is with init and runit. The current environment does not favor keeping the spirit of the past alive, but burning it to the ground and erasing it from memory. And when serious deficiencies are found in the new hotness, the answer is to burn that to the ground too. I blame the GNOME project, whose manifesto was called "Let's Make Unix Not Suck"; Unix not sucking involved writing a Windows-like inner platform and encouraging or coercing developers to target that instead. Famously, GNOME has undergone at least two slash-and-burn cycles and its latest installation is known for its instability.