Shell scripting isn't "archaic nonsense" at all, it's just that the warts from how most shells implement their command language (ksh/bash/POSIX sh) are holding us back. If you go look at Plan 9 rc shell scripts, you'll see how much cleaner they are. In addition, the s6 people have done some interesting things with execline (which looks kind of like Tcl), which works as a chain loader instead of holding the shell resident, has a simple parser and is performant: http://skarnet.org/software/execline/

The more I realize all the untapped potential lying around, the more I realize how so many Linux users are living in their monoculture. Unfortunately there is no one there to amplify all the good efforts and hidden gems scattered all over the place, so you have people just reading Phoronix and LWN articles and standing in their bubble. Meanwhile, all the non-Linux Unices and the "toy project" builders are doing great things, but everyone thinks they're irrelevant and dying.

> The more I realize all the untapped potential lying around, the more I realize how so many Linux users are living in their monoculture. Unfortunately there is no one there to amplify all the good efforts and hidden gems scattered all over the place, so you have people just reading Phoronix and LWN articles and standing in their bubble. Meanwhile, all the non-Linux Unices and the "toy project" builders are doing great things, but everyone thinks they're irrelevant and dying.

This is one of the main reasons I approve of systemd. It is something completely new fighting against the old entrenched cruft. End result might be good, might be bad, but at least it is activity instead of sedateness.

For all bad things that could be said about Poettering, at least he has ideas and the confidence to execute on them.

> This is one of the main reasons I approve of systemd. It is something completely new fighting against the old entrenched cruft.

Most people aren't anti-systemd because it's new, but because it doesn't conform to their philosophy of how their computer should run. There could be newer init systems that conform to their ideals, but systemd is not one of them.

Could there be, or are there? Because it is entirely possible that their philosophy is too rigid to permit a system that is substantially different from what exists now, in which case "They're against it because it's new" seems like a fair assessment.

Are you arguing that it may me that all objectors to systemd would be dissatisfied with all possible init systems different than what exists now?

I'm arguing that "It doesn't agree with their philosophy" is not incompatible with "They don't like it because it's new." It's not uncommon for people to build personal philosophies that work out to "change is bad."

Important note: I said I approve, not like, systemd. It is an important distinction, because I like that there is activity even though I might not be such fan of the software itself. This is in contrast to (some) anti-systemd people who seem to be opposed to the very existence of systemd.

>If you go look at Plan 9 rc shell scripts, you'll see how much cleaner they are.

I used rc as my interactive shell and for very light shell scripting for over 10 years, and I consider it only slight better than the other Unix shells. In fact, the fact that rc's rules for escaping (quoting) characters like hash and space are incompatible with Emacs's shell mode's file-name completion was enough to cancel out any benefit I have derived from the relative "cleanness" of rc.

the (minor) advantages of rc for me: not having to remember the more complex quoting rules of bash, etc. unlike with bash, etc, no part of an rc commandline is ever interpreted twice except for when the double-interpretation is caused by an explicit use of the "backquote" (eval and substitute) operator.

I know this is just my subjective opinion, but I find Unix shells, including rc, inferior to almost any other programming language.

I always got a little sad when I needed to write anything requiring an if statement or anything but the simplest loop in rc (or any other Unix shell). I have come to realize that I would much, much rather write such things in Emacs Lisp -- and have transitioned to doing so. (The start-up time of Emacs --batch is fast enough on modern hardware not to be an impediment.)

I wish I could up-vote this more than once.

+1 for the bash comments

+1 for the toy projects

Anyone remember how Linux got started?

This execline looks interesting. I use the fish shell, which also abandons POSIX compatibility for simpler parsing. Of course, the "this is not UNIXy" cries are plenty.

By Plan9 rc scripts, do you mean specific scripts that the OS used, or do you just mean rc as opposed to sh/bsh/ksh?

If anything the whole systemd mess has put more attention on the init system and dependencies. There's plenty of drama and its a modern vi/emacs kde/gnome fight that people are passionate about.

I think what burns a lot of us anti systemd people is the apparently lack of sound engineering principles and overengineering. It's just a damn init system! Other init systems (runit, etc) had already mostly solved many of the problems systemd claims to solve with dramatically less code leaving things like logging, scheduled jobs, etc to tools that absolutely didn't need replacing.

Or allow for replacement A to be mixed with existing system B, rather than have the whole edifice torn down and rebuilt.

Yes, I have a side project to experiment with scripting the OS with Lua [1] - it has enough functionality to bring up a system (networking, mounts, namespaces etc) without any other code.

[1] https://github.com/justincormack/ljsyscall

And using "Scriptable operating systems with Lua[1]" there is no userspace needed?

[1] http://dl.acm.org/authorize?N80603 [2] http://2014.splashcon.org/track/dls14-papers#Proceedings

Well, you could use it for that in theory yes, though no one has tried yet as far as I know...

I agree. So far I've seen it as a classic conservatives vs. liberals debate. The conservatives have no interest at all in changing the Unix paradigm under Linux. It works perfectly well, thank you. The liberals see it as archaic and unsuited to a wide variety of new use cases including rapid-deployment VMs, containers, mobile and laptop computers, and the desktop in general.

I side with the liberals here, but with a few caveats. I'm not a huge fan of systemd, though I agree that it'll probably get fixed and so far it seems better than the hairy old SysV-init mess.

The debate is doing more harm than even a slightly broken systemd would do-- Linux is already far too fragmented to no benefit. I'm all for freedom but I don't like pointless forks that add nothing.

“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types -- the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.”

― G.K. Chesterton

How about a third way? If you want to go on making mistakes, do so over there, and only bring it back here when you can prove that it will not blow up in our faces.

Not really, I use a dozen init systems, each for a different situation, and I'm interested in keeping it that way. The problem is that systemd is that is being forcefully pushed to all distros. For instance, by merging udev with systemd.

Maybe those forks don't add nothing for you, but for me they're beneficial, because I think Darwinian evolution also applies to software.

> I use a dozen init systems, each for a different situation, and I'm interested in keeping it that way.

You might like that, but it makes life hell for developers who write and package any kind of daemon/service.

I keep seeing this, and i keep wondering why said developers are doing any packaging at all.

A binary and clear instructions on how it is launched from a command line should suffice for any competent admin.

He should then be able to fit it into the boot scheme of whatever system he is maintaining.

Absolutely not, only if they depend on systemd. If they follow UNIX conventions, they don't need to edit a single file. Writing a daemon init script was a solved problem decades ago, and that script will serve for every init system.

Nope. Some systemd distros do not support daemon init scripts done the old way.

>The conservatives have no interest at all in changing the Unix paradigm under Linux

The unix paradigm doesn't exist under linux. It was dead before linux got started (the kernel, in the early 90s).

> The idea of a Unix where you get rid of bash/csh/whatever and just run a lua/python/ruby prompt and have your apps implemented largely in that same language

systemd doesn't help with that AT ALL. Other init systems do support this notion much better.