Joel Roth via Dng said on Thu, 23 May 2024 09:10:31 -1000


>Is this history otherwise relevant?

Maybe, maybe not. I don't find this guy believable, because of *his*
past history.

>I'm asking because it
>seems like a fairly thorough, readable account.

I'd call it *too* thorough, and lacking readability because it's too
thorough. Also, it comes across to me as one man's viewpoint. And once
again, still, in 2024, he's evangelizing some of systemd's "features".

Joel, in my last email I blamed the messenger (you), and didn't mean
to. I meant to blame Mr. Uselessd.

His history minimizes the fact that in 2001 we could have used
sysvinit's PID1 plus djb's daemontools, to parallel instantiate and
realtime control daemons. Today he minimizes the fact that almost
anything worthwhile that systemd gives you s6 also gives you (though in
a more intelligent manner).

For those of you not familiar with this stuff, in the second half of
2014, when the phony balony kangaroo court "DD ER" de-facto declared
systemd to be the one and only Debian init system, all of us with any
sense of sane architecture panicked. And two guys, Mr. Uselessd and Mr.
Nosh, took it upon themselves to build "less all-subsuming" (my words,
not theirs) knockoffs of systemd, and for awhile a lot of us, myself
included, put our hopes on them instead of rallying around existing
OpenRC, runit, s6, or even djb's daemontools, which is the father of
runit, s6, and several less used supervisors.

By the way, if you'd like to see a more contemporaneous, technical,
political and tutorial and less professorial historical account of the
systemd assault, see my Manjaro Experiments page at
http://troubleshooters.com/linux/init/manjaro_experiments.htm . Also,
take a look at the archives from the Modular-Debian list, our safe
harbour after the GR but before Devuan. And please note that Joel Roth
was the person who provided Modular-Debian for our community.

SteveT

Steve Litt

Autumn 2023 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21