Le 18/12/2024 à 04:34, Steve Litt a écrit :
> viverna via Dng said on Wed, 18 Dec 2024 20:58:37 +0100
>
>> It's a bit old news but i have read this today:
>> https://www.gnu.org/software/shepherd/news/2024/12/the-shepherd-1.0.0-released/
>> I known it being made in Guile and the configuration seems declarative
>> (epoch and systemd style), but i have never used it.
>> Has anyone in this list tried it to know how it works?
>> Thanks in advance.
> I know enough about Guile to know it's a tough language.
>
> It's been in the making for 21 years, making its inception year 2003 or
> 2004. IIRC this is about the same time DJB created the spectacular
> Daemontools, and a few years later than (urk) upstart. If they'd come
> out with Shepherd in, let's say 2006, it would have been simpler than
> upstart and would have had the ordered bootup that Daemontools lacked.
> It would have been a contender.
>
> But somewhere around 2014 Daemontools was extended (independently) to
> s6 and runit, both of which proved ordered startup unnecessary if you
> simply put test dependencies in the (mercifully short) startup scripts,
> and both s6 and runit could assume PID1 duties. In the past couple
> years, s6 came out with some addons that made ordered start a reality.
> And actually, before Covid I came out with Littkit, a set of
> shellscripts that could facilitate ordered startup on Daemontools, s6
> and runit, although Littkit needed a little modification to accommodate
> the different commands of those three inits.
>
> So here comes Shepherd, 10 years after runit and s6 and 20 years after
> Daemontools, with something more complex and harder for most users to
> work with, because Guile's a lot harder than sh or ksh. And did you
> take a look at that dependency graph on the referenced page? Ho dam,
> that borders on poetterism.
>
> If Shepherd had achieved stability in 2006, I would have learned more
> Guile and sung Shepherd's praises forever. But coming out in 2024, it's
> solving problems already solved ten years ago. Too little too late.
>
    I agree with GNU people that an extension language is a great
thing, particularly when it has a GUI extension like Tcl/Tk. I don't
think Guile has a GUI extension but it seems a pretty high-level
language, like Lua, and on the very contrary of Tcl/Tk.

    Extensibility in Guile language is IMHO the only strong argument in
favour of Shepherd today. Configuration through a real language is far
superior to any ad'hoc config file syntax, but it takes a learning. Ten
years earlier it might have blocked in the egg the growth of the Systemd
monster. Too late also for this. I bet only Guile fans will install
Shepherd, therefore no distro. Too bad!

 --     Didier