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A comment on Devuan “ASCII” 2.0 Release Candidate is now available. Parent comment

Re:Devuan “ASCII” 2.0 Release Candidate is now available by pmden on Thursday May 10, 2018 @04:24AM (#17037180)
Systemd isn't one component, so you'd be mistaken assuming everything in the systemd project is necessary to start a service. But second to that, I'm not sure why you think nginx_enable='YES' is fundamentally less opaque than an nginx.service file. Both are parsed by another application. As for why someone would make that 'trade-off' - I much prefer being able to add "Restart=on-failure" than using daemontools, and I don't have the luxury of working with one single distribution and remember the faff involved with initscripts differing between CentOS and Debian.

My reasons aside, I'd think a more sensible question would be "why would you actively avoid using the init system that's shipping by default on what constitutes at least 90% of the Linux server market when you're using Linux?". I don't think eyes equate to quality and stability, but I do think Red Hat, and SUSE, and Canonical and Oracle selling server solutions using it will.

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Re:Devuan “ASCII” 2.0 Release Candidate is now available by dozzie on Thursday May 10, 2018 @04:40AM (#17037226)
> I'm not sure why you think nginx_enable='YES' is fundamentally less opaque than an nginx.service file. Both are parsed by another application.

My guess: because the "another application" that parses nginx_enable=YES is a (rc) shell script instead of an ELF blob, so you can track its execution.

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Re:Devuan “ASCII” 2.0 Release Candidate is now available by JdeBP on Thursday May 10, 2018 @05:00PM (#17042926)
That is not actually true. It is of course parsed by a shell, not by a shell script, which is indeed an "ELF blob".

Moreover, that shell is, on some operating systems, only one of the parsers. OpenBSD, for example, introduced a rule a few versions ago that rc.conf is not shell script. It is a set of key=value assignments that can be written and read by other programs too, not just by a full shell parser and not requiring a shell script parser.

One such program is rcctl. Another is FreeBSD's sysrc.

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Re:Devuan “ASCII” 2.0 Release Candidate is now available by andrewshadura on Thursday May 10, 2018 @06:43AM (#17037722)
But do you need to?
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Re:Devuan “ASCII” 2.0 Release Candidate is now available by dozzie on Thursday May 10, 2018 @07:07AM (#17037833)
Yes, when something goes awry with the initscripts system. And systemd is not exactly famous for its transparency of execution and stability of options' behaviour.
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Re:Devuan “ASCII” 2.0 Release Candidate is now available by alxlaz on Thursday May 10, 2018 @05:43AM (#17037468)
> But second to that, I'm not sure why you think nginx_enable='YES' is fundamentally less opaque than an nginx.service file. Both are parsed by another application.

That's true of both plain-text configuration files and Windows Registry keys ;-).

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