[CentOS] Some thoughts on systemd

[Mark Tinberg]

On Jul 18, 2014, at 7:14 AM, Timothy Murphy <gayleard at alice.it> wrote:

>  In principle this should simplify the algorithms involved.
>  But it seems to me that the way in which it has been implemented
>  has in fact increased the complication rather than the reverse.

From my perspective this is a simplified implementation, service files have very simple and well documented behavior, any complication I see seems to be inherent to the problem space and existed before systemd came on the scene, so it’s not created by systemd.  A simple service example would be rsyslogd.service which just reads /etc/sysconfig/rsyslogd and runs /sbin/rsyslogd -n $SYSLOGD_OPTIONS a more complicated example would be mounting NFS filesystems, which has a bunch of dependancies on RPC port mapper services like idmap or gssapi a special filesystem in /var/lib/nfs etc.  Neil Brown wrote a series of articles for LWN on replacing the shell scripts in nfs-utils with systemd unit files for SuSE. https://lwn.net/Articles/584175/

So simple things are trivial, more complicated things are possible and the options are there in the config file if you want to use them but you aren’t forced to.

— 
Mark Tinberg, System Administrator
Division of Information Technology - Network Services
University of Wisconsin - Madison
mtinberg at wisc.edu