On Tue, 3 May 2016 01:19:40 +0200
parazyd <parazyd@???> wrote:

> The current init system is old. Ancient. We should all agree on it.
> Devuan is looking for a new init system that is not systemd and my
> personal choice for this task from now on is Gentoo's OpenRC.

I'd love to see OpenRC as an option. I'd hate to see it become the
default.

1) OpenRC cannot respawn. The only way most OpenRC installations get
respawning gettys is that their pid1 is still sysvinit, which can
respawn via /etc/inittab.

2) From what I've seen in Gentoo/Funtoo, OpenRC init scripts are every
bit as gruesome as those from sysvinit. Sure, the OpenRC ones don't
have to be as complex, but truth be told, neither do the sysvinit
ones.

3) As a Runit user for five months, and a guy who has experimented with
s6, I believe that daemontools-inspired inits like Runit and s6 (or
s6-rc) are much superior. They have tiny run scripts, they don't
need all that LSB time machine garbage, their test points are easy
to measure and strongarm, they make it trivial to make your own
daemons (I've made daemons in Python and launched them via Runit).
They can be installed by a mere mortal using make and gcc, and have
almost no dependencies.

So, to summarize my opinion:

OpenRC as an option, heck yeah! Gentoo, Funtoo and Manjaro-OpenRC have
used it for years, and it works wonderfully if you don't care about
respawning.

OpenRC as the default, heck no! If we ever change the default init,
let's do so in a way that makes real progress, and progress in the
direction that most people believing in the Unix Philosophy would
appreciate.

[snip]

> While it may not seem much, this task is not a one-person-job and
> therefore I am looking for co-maintainers of the OpenRC package for
> Devuan. Please let me know if you are interested in co-maintaining a
> new init system for Devuan with me.

Heavens no it's not a one-person-job. OpenRC is fairly complex. And
shipping its init scripts would be a full time job. I'd say that
adapting Runit or Epoch, or maybe s6(rc) would be a one person job, but
not OpenRC.

SteveT

Steve Litt
April 2016 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21