On Tue, Oct 16, 2018 at 06:05:21PM +0200, Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult wrote:
>
> I personally, got tired of inventing yet another init system - did that
> over 20 years ago (actually, some things not so different from *early*
> systemd - before they became totally nuts).
>
> The problem, IMHO, isn't so much creating an init system, but
> maintaining the corresponding config/scripts for all the packages.
>
> One thing we perhaps could do is inventing a small declarative meta-
> config language for certain common service types / usecases, so we
> could automatically generate a large portion of the scripts/config
> automatically for many init systems.

As long as it doesn't metastatize into yet another thing like
systemd unit files, incompatible with everything else.
I realise that avoiding that is what you're proposing, but it's worth
emphasizing.
Systemd's unit files may well contain the information we need, but it's
mot clear to me that their specification is stable enough for our
purpose.

I wonder if the right place to start is to write some kind of text
processor that looks through existing init scripts lookinfg for
similarity and difference, and then sorting out which differences are
important and which similarities are copied bugs.

-- hendrik