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A comment on Linux distros without systemd. Parent comment

Re:Linux distros without systemd by NikkiA on Monday May 20, 2019 @10:09AM (#19960440)
sysvinit was at least a thousand times easier than bsd init scripts, and I occasionally see people that are opposed to both systemd and sysvinit and think rc.local was 'it'.

shakes head slowly

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Re:Linux distros without systemd by JdeBP on Monday May 20, 2019 @11:42AM (#19961559)
BSD rc scripts haven't worked in the way that you think that they have, for decades.

Mewburn rc, which reduced many rc scripts to a couple of shell function calls and a handful of variable declarations, has been used by NetBSD since 2001, and FreeBSD started using it about a year later. OpenBSD, furthermore, reinvented Mewburn rc around 8 years ago. Project Trident (formerly TrueOS formerly PC-BSD) has also since then switched from Mewburn rc to OpenRC.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10357589

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11550802

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14736175

/etc/rc.local was first declared obsolete in the BSD world and replaced by a system of drop-in files in a directory back in 1995.

* http://jdebp.info./FGA/rc.local-is-history.html

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Re:Linux distros without systemd by yellowapple on Monday May 20, 2019 @09:56PM (#19967027)
> /etc/rc.local was first declared obsolete in the BSD world and replaced by a system of drop-in files in a directory back in 1995.

OpenBSD still documents it as an implicitly-recommended way to start programs (though if it's possible to start it via e.g. rc.(local.)conf, then that's obviously preferable).

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Re:Linux distros without systemd by yellowapple on Monday May 20, 2019 @09:51PM (#19967012)
> sysvinit was at least a thousand times easier than bsd init scripts

¿Qué?

I guess we'll have to beg to differ here, but I prefer OpenBSD's (for example) init system over sysvinit or systemd any day. rc.subr is a godsend for eradicating all the boilerplate that "justified" switching to systemd. Enabling/disabling a daemon is as easy as adding a line to /etc/rc.conf.local (or just running "rcctl enable mydaemond", which does that for me). No fiddling with symlinking scripts to runlevel-specific folders (or, in fact, dealing with runlevels at all; if I need single-user mode, that's what bsd.rd is for).

One of these days I'd love to start ripping out the initscripts on my Slackware machines and replace them with something closer to OpenBSD (or hell, I wonder if I can just port OpenBSD's init to Linux?).

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