Hi all,

In an hour I'll be mass-announcing my presentation on user
specific runit at the 9/3/2025, 7pm (Eastern Daylight Time) GoLUG
meeting at https://meet.jit.si/golug. The Devuan list is different from
others in that the runit init system is actually of interest to many
people on this list.

As you know, roughly speaking runit has two parts:

1) PID1, which does mounts and network setup and other quickie one-shot
processes forked by PID1.

2) runsvdir, the daemon supervisor, which runs (with restart) daemons,
and gives the user simple control over start, stop and restart via
the sv command.

A user specific runit is *only* #2. It's further simplified by the fact
that it is run as a normal user, for that normal user, by that normal
user. Another simplification is that you use it only to supervise
daemons specific to the specific user, which is usually very few
daemons. What this all means is that user specific runit is a great way
to dip your feet into runit without any risk to your actual init system.

If you ever want to learn about runit, user specific runit is the
simplest, most risk free way to do it. User specific runit is
completely orthogonal to the actual init system: You can run a user
specific runit on a computer initted by sysvinit, runit, s6, OpenRC,
Epoch, Busybox Init, the init system they use on BSD, or GNU Shepherd.
Even more amazingly, because systemd hasn't (yet) inserted sabotage
code to prevent the use of user specific runit, it's just as easy to
implement on a system initted by systemd as any other system.

If you need to run daemons as a normal user, after that normal user is
logged in and running X or Wayland, you should attend this
presentation. If you're curious about runit and want to kick the tires
without affecting (risking) other parts of the system, you should
attend this presentation. If you're curious about s6 you should attend
this presentation, because 90% of this presentation's material also
applies to runit's close cousin, s6.

Thanks,

SteveT

Steve Litt
http://444domains.com