Alessandro Selli <alessandroselli@???> wrote:

>> Hard to believe I listened to the same talk Corbet
>> is describing. What I heard was a propaganda piece,
>> finding reasons to sell the systemd approach
>> to BSD conference attendees.
>
> Not really. He points out there were good reasons to want a new init,
> that systemd was a try at innovating something that was old, and that
> this is a different matter compared to *how* that change was implemented.

Beat me to it. I listened and he did make many good points which you've pointed out much more elegantly than I would have managed. While picking out bits by time, I liked his dig at the state of Debian management at around 16 minutes in when he mentions "that vote" :-)

> "systemd makes heavy use of dbus. I'm not a big fan of dbus but i am a
> big fan of messages. [...] One of the things that I told the BSD people
> was basically we should write our own message transport. My version, if
> I were to write one, would be kernel resident rather than user space and
> would allow a lot more of security and authentication and access control
> elements on the actual bus endpoints".

Exactly. Whatever the merits (or otherwise) of dbus as an implementation of a messaging system, the function it's trying to implement is a good idea. Ditto udev. And to be honest, a significant chunk of systemd as well - the ideas are good, the implementation and the way it's been managed, <ahem> "no so good".