The 25/07/12, Kevin Chadwick wrote:
If a service is not provided: - with SysVinit you have to write the whole script usually relying on whatever library the distribution provides (which tend to be error-prone); - with systemd, you just write a configuration file.
Well arch has some includes to make it prettier.
Look:
On OpenBSD you have
<...>
or
<...>
or
<...> I don't find that pretty nor even smart at all.
This also demonstrates how easy shell can be
Or not. Come back to reality (and I won't talk about BSD systems which are not the Linux world), shell scripts for init are a nightmare for plenty of reasons: - various API; - API not always fully respected in all the scripts; - no real journal; - almost nothing in API for detailed logs; - bad experience with parallelism; - static dependencies; - not events aware (except for TCP sockets); - slower; - almost no cgroup isolation support (and so goes for resource limits strategies); - almost anything for IO class and priority; - nothing well-defined to wait for availability of resources (remote fs, advanced authentication protocols, etc); - tracking of jobs/daemons sucks; - respawing absent; - no D-BUS interface; - no possibility to select which daemons to start from kernel command line (so multi-environments configuration for laptops often sucks); - relying on large binaries (starting from the shells); - etc, etc. Nobody will convince me that the pretended easy, smart, robust, hacking-friendly, etc world of init scripts is a wonderfull world which just worked for ages. I've had too many glitches for years (often hard to resolve) ― sometimes indirectly related from so unexpected pieces of the system ― to believe such thing, sorry. The ini style for configuration files of systemd or the rc.conf split into 3 or 5 files looks to be nit-picking to me.
One of the founding principles of UNIX is that small tools that do a single job well allow complete flexibility whereas large tools do what the devs foresee very well but will likely hinder users or the unforeseen uses (hacking).
Hackers know C. Admins don't hack and write scripts, too often poorly; whatever my statement will hurt readers or not. -- Nicolas Sebrecht