Just to be clear . . .

The only thing which I said (at least I hope I said) was that for me,
the elephant-in-the-room question is: why is systemd not optional?
That's the question which in my view should be asked of anyone who
evangelises about systemd or thinks it's a good idea. I have asked it a
few times, and never got an intelligible or intelligent reply.

I dislike systemd for all the reasons usually given, and a few more
besides. But I dislike it the most for not being optional. I see that
as genuinely tragic. If ONLY it had been optional! Those who liked it
could use it. Those who didn't could use something else. It would have
been a win-win, because LP and co. would have got constructive
criticism and maybe even praise, instead of endless hatemail, and as a
result, systemd might have actually got better (yes, I know - it's
difficult to contemplate that possibility). And the linux community
wouldn't have been divided against itself.

I've never found the "faster boot time" argument as in any way
convincing, and obviously I've not used systemd-based distros enough to
know whether it's borne out in practice. I've always assumed that it
was probably based on the obsession with parallelising the startup of
processes - which to me always seemed a bad idea anyway. Say that for
some reason, a disk or other device responds a few milliseconds more
slowly than usual: that could cause a knock-on effect which at worst
might stop a system from booting. If processes start in an orderly and
predictable way as configured, something like that might have have less
impact. (I did once have to deal with a box which would only boot
intermittently: it was running ubuntu, and I eventually found that
someone had decided to "upgrade" it to a systemd-based release. From
what I could make of the logging information (not a lot), it appeared
that something like the above was happening. Once the box was rolled
back to a pre-systemd release, the problem went away.)

The thing which permanently set me against systemd was that when I
first tried it (testing RH7), the box wouldn't shut down. It just gave
a message about "asserting shutdown state" or some such pompous
baloney, and then hung. I had to hold down the power button. When the
system came back up, it complained about ungraceful shutdown and ran a
full set of disk checks. Maybe not so bad if the box is on my desk.
Rather more of a problem if it's a mission-critical server in an
unmanned server farm, I'm trying to sort out a major problem on it, and
it's 03:00 in the morning. (Strangely enough, I noticed on one of the
FB linux groups only a few days ago that someone else had just had the
shutdown hang problem.)

On Mon, 2024-06-17 at 11:01 +0200, Simon Walter wrote:
> On 2024-06-16 19:27, Didier Kryn wrote:
> >     Probably the strongest argument is the one of Peter Duffy. And
> > also
> > the great lie about systemd: it was meant to speed-up boot, which
> > it
> > fails to do, and actually it just replaces the traditional
> > Unix/Linux
> > "do one thing and to it well" commands by requests to a big do-it-
> > all
> > black-box.
> >
> >     All these syetemd afficionados, did they ever compare boot-
> > speed? Do
> > they have any idea of what the boot time is on a sans-systemd box?
> > Boot-time is a non-existing problem and when one person or group
> > pretends to solve a non-existing problem, they just lie to people
> > to
> > sale them something they would otherwise never buy.
>
> I understand this is/was supposed be one "selling point", but, I
> don't
> know anyone who says that it is the reason that systemd was created,
> which it kind of sounds like you're saying.
>
> Is that what your saying? Peter Duffy and whoever else claim that is
> the
> reason for systemd's creation? I'd like to read the juicy details.
>
> The "serious" reasons that are given for systemd (a unifying layer, a
> improved init, etc.) are also equally non-existent problems.
> _______________________________________________
> Dng mailing list
> Dng@???
> https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng