Why Did It Take Devuan Two Years to Replace Systemd?

Re:Why Did It Take Devuan Two Years to Replace Systemd? by dvfjsdhgfv on Tuesday July 11, 2017 @04:31PM (#14747787)

With Emacs vs Vi it was a way to amuse ourselves, because everyone is free to use their own favourite editor. With Systemd, we are not - we're all forced to use it. Yes, it did solved some SysV init problems, but introduced a few of its own. Most importantly though, it grew into a more complex subsystem with numerous dependencies, and this unfortunately causes problems unheard of in the old days of SysV Init. I don't think so many people would complain that hard if Systemd was easy to replace (which I think is the main point of this unnecessarily lengthy post).

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Re:Why Did It Take Devuan Two Years to Replace Systemd? by khedoros1 on Tuesday July 11, 2017 @05:13PM (#14748140)

That's my biggest issue with it: tendrils branching out into all the other aspects of the system. Systemd won't always be the state of the art, and we'll want to replace it someday.

Replacing SysV init? Relatively easy. Replacing Systemd, all the ancillary programs, desktop environments that it ties into, etc? It's a ton of work. One of the arguments I've heard repeated is that it's all very modular, but that doesn't seem to be true in practice.

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Re:Why Did It Take Devuan Two Years to Replace Systemd? by KirinDave on Tuesday July 11, 2017 @05:40PM (#14748329)

Replacing SysV init is not easy, unless you want to copy the majority of its problems as well.

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Re:Why Did It Take Devuan Two Years to Replace Systemd? by JdeBP on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @03:03AM (#14750667)

Actually, replacing van Smoorenburg init is easy, because very few softwares actually use /etc/inittab as a mechanism. "On the fingers of one hand" is actually close to the mark: inittab is used by van Smoorenburg rc, the old style startup for things like runit and daemontools, and a couple of private projects that people have not published but to whose users/creators I have had to explain the death of inittab.

Replacing van Smoorenburg rc is somewhat harder, but OpenRC does exist. As indeed does Mewburn rc (albeit that that is designed to run under FreeBSD init rather than van Smoorenburg init).

Three points to learn for these systemd discussions:

- init is not rc.

- We do not live in a world where nothing happened in between 1992 and 2011. A lot of things were done, a lot of softwares now exist, and the world did not step from van Smoorenburg init+rc to systemd. (Indeed, in 1992, the AIX SRC already existed.)

- van Smoorenburg init+rc are themselves clones of other softwares. These clones over the years added things like parallel startup with startpar, dependency ordering with insserv, faster boot times by switching to a shell with less startup overhead caused by its interactive-mode features, and a distinction between emergency and rescue modes.

* http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/09/05/0/

* http://jdebp.eu./FGA/inittab-is-history.html

* http://jdebp.eu./FGA/system-5-rc-problems.html

* http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/

* http://jdebp.eu./FGA/emergency-and-rescue-mode-bootstrap.htm...

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Re:Why Did It Take Devuan Two Years to Replace Systemd? by khedoros1 on Tuesday July 11, 2017 @07:49PM (#14749063)

I didn't say that it was easy, I said that it would be easy relative to the effort necessary to replace Systemd.

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Re:Why Did It Take Devuan Two Years to Replace Systemd? by KirinDave on Tuesday July 11, 2017 @07:42PM (#14749031)

Use a different Linux distribution, then? Most are basically interchangable, outside of real outliers like Qubes.

Your distro maintainers obviously thought it was a worthwhile decision for them to make.

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