:: [DNG] Init respawns - was: Be prepa…
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Autor: marc
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Dla: dng
Stare tematy: Re: [DNG] Be prepared for the fall of systemd
Temat: [DNG] Init respawns - was: Be prepared for the fall of systemd
> Thanks Karl,
>
> Some questions:


Hello

> 1) Does Busybox init require the daemon to background itself?


So I seem no reason why "nohup daemon > /var/log/logfile &" isn't sufficient
for this, or is there something I am not aware of ?

> 2) Does Busybox init give you a reasonable way to automatically restart the process
> after the process terminates?
>
> 3) Does Busybox init give you the choice of auto-restart or not for each different
> process? If it does, that's something specifically missing in Runit.


At the risk of pinning my own interpretation on this:

I suppose for quick, dirty and crashy hacks maybe automated restarts
are useful to paper over some problems. But if the daemon you are running
is likely to crash, it might also just hang in an infinite loop or
leak file descriptors, or fill up a partition or grind through swap, things
that a respawn doesn't really solve ...

We are often told that "thesedays computers are cheap and programmers are
expensive" as an excuse for writing flaky software, and from the perspective
of the greedy and immortal AI that is a corporation, this makes sense - a
bit of bespoke software, even if flaky, might do the work of a human more
quickly and cheaper while the costs are externalised.

But the free software universe things are different - unreliable or
bloated software wastes the time and hardware resources of thousands, perhaps
millions of people. And even if you are happy to ignore the environmental
costs (electricity, more hardware bought more often), then maybe some
other reasoning might be persuasive: I certainly often marvel at the
craftsmanship of people from previous ages - from as small as an excellent
hand tool to as expansive as a church, mosque or similar - those things were made
not "meh, good enough", but as good as humanly possible, and I would
think that the free software world has some similarities there - while
software might be written to scratch an itch, the solution is often
created for the joy of it, for the satisfaction of building something
really good - be it just for fun, the desire to leave a legacy or
building a contemplative mandala.

TL;DR: just install better daemons ;)

regards

marc