On Sun, Dec 13, 2015 at 04:39:05PM +0000, Timothy Murphy wrote:
Alice Wonder wrote:
Just that it is not difficult to use, there are some advantages -
Why don't you say what the advantages are, instead of launching into a philosophical discussion of "market share".
So, while the parallel startup can sometimes produce a faster startup, I believe it is more a side effect from the proper management of service dependencies. In SysV init, you either had hard-coded sequential startup of some parts of the OS (in the shell script that started init and mounted all the filesystems, ran fsck, whatever) and then the increasibly difficult to manage SysV init scripts, which were ordered by the chkconfig numbers. There's no explicit dependencies, you had to basically modify those numbers if you knew they needed to start before some other number, and if the packaged init script had a number that just didn't work out, then you're stuck maintaining that script for the rest of time.
Upstart tried to fix this, and it probably would have been what we're all using instead of systemd if their development process wasn't broken. But even when we had Upstart in CentOS6, no one wanted to use it, they all used SysV init scripts.
As a sysadmin, I like systemd because I can finally manage the order in which services start up and keep my sanity. Don't like how the packaged unit does something? Its easy to override a setting or write your own, and you don't have to worry about the package overwriting it because its a separate file in /etc.
As a packager, I like systemd because I can write one service unit file, and know that I don't have to worry about the ordering of services, and I even get some cross-distribution portability.