[CentOS] Cemtos 7 : Systemd alternatives ?

Tue Jul 8 16:12:50 UTC 2014
Steve Lindemann <steve at marmot.org>

On 7/8/2014 8:49 AM, Russell Miller wrote:
> For the record, I'm not uncomfortable with change.  I'm uncomfortable with stupid,
> poorly thought out, monolithic change that ignores half a century of the UNIX philosophy.
> And creating a daemon that tries to handle everything but the kitchen sink and implementing
> it in such a way as to make it nearly incomprehensible to me certainly qualifies
> as that type of change.
>
> Sysvinit may not be perfect, but it's UNIX.  Systemd is...  a lot of things, but more
> of a windows-like solution than I"m comfortable with.  It's just dumb.  Surely there could
> have been a better way of accomplishing their goals without creating the equivalent of
> Cartman's Trapper Keeper.
>
> And yea, I'm kind of an old white guy (is 38 old?)  The guy who called that out as
> a negative is not helping his cause with me.  This old white guy has been doing Linux
> administration when some people on this list were pulling the hair of girls they liked
> and eating bugs.
>
> (and if that was yesterday, I don't want to hear about it. :))
>
> --Russell

Well said.  Why are the old proven ways somehow so deficient that we 
absolutely must replace them with something else, no matter how badly 
thought out.  (yes I'm an old fart by some folks figuring, I actually 
prefer the command line and started with punch cards and paper tape).

Change isn't bad... but change for change's sake is stupid and that's 
what this looks like.  New is not always better.  Based on my 
observations over the years, new is rarely better!  The more rapid the 
change, the more radical the change, the more likely the change won't 
stand the test of time, or rational thinking.  Do the analysis, really 
do it without a bias toward a specific answer and sometimes, yes, 
sometimes the answer is leave things alone, they work fine the way they 
are.  Just because something is old doesn't mean it needs to be 
replaced.  Of course, sometimes the answer is to make changes, but keep 
them small, make them incrementally and give them time to prove 
themselves before rushing headlong towards the next thing.

Sadly, poorly thought out change seem to be the trend, and not a 
surprise given the number of folks with Windows backgrounds making their 
way into the Linux world.  We are definitely loosing touch with the UNIX 
philosophy and that was what made it a great operating system for doing 
real work.

I started my work life as a maintainer and while I've done my fair share 
of development, I've always thought like a maintainer.  Change almost 
always breaks things, so do it carefully and slowly and with thought not 
just about the local impact, but the global impact.  Please!
--
Steve