On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 04:48:01PM -0700, Patrick Murphy wrote:
Could you give me a brief explanation as to why init scripts are better?
They really aren't. The best argument one can make in their favor is that they're already debugged and stable. systemd, as a new thing, will inevitably go thru' some growing pains. That's to be expected. The problem is that systemd is a brilliant solution to the wrong problem. It's trying to be all things simultaneously -- which is just way too much centralization for sanity. The superior option is to use daemontools. Not as PID 1 but as the means of starting up everything after the filesystem is mounted. You get process supervision, startup in parallel, you loose the unjustified delicacy of inherent in init scripts, and you get small, compact, well-tested programs that do one thing and one thing well. If you had to go more modern, I suppose you could use runit in lieu of daemontools but I'm not exactly sure how much you gain from that.