[arch-general] When will Arch switch to Upstart

[Isaac Dupree]

On 01/19/11 14:03, Yaro Kasear wrote:
> And comments about Ubuntu and their competence are entirely relevant to this
> discussion, as Upstart is entirely their creation. Would you rather I talk
> about people who had nothing to do with its code? The Ubuntu devs are behind
> Upstart, they're not that great at what they do when it comes to the actual
> system side of Ubuntu. Therefore why should we consider Upstart an
> improvement.

Argument ad hominem.  We can be precise; it's more obviously rude that 
way.  Scott James Remnant wrote Upstart.  I can't speak for Ubuntu, but 
I've seen Remnant presenting and he seemed quite competent.  Software is 
hard; Upstart was the first attempt at changing 'init' in decades, so 
there was little experiential knowledge of Linux 'init' development when 
it started in 2006.  In fact, in the process of writing Upstart, Remnant 
and his co-workers made Ubuntu boot faster largely by working with Xorg 
and Linux kernel developers.  There are now upstream changes due to the 
risk Ubuntu took with Upstart.  *Arch* therefore now boots faster 
because of Remnant.  He's a pretty smart guy who knows what he's doing 
even if some of us disagree with what he's doing; I was at his 
presentation "How We Made Ubuntu Boot Faster"
http://events.linuxfoundation.org/linuxcon2010/remnant

That is equally no reason to switch to Upstart.  We can be grateful to 
Remnant and choose the best (technically & socially) solution *for Arch* 
*in 2011*.  Of course he's enthusiastic about Upstart but I'm sure he 
wouldn't mind.  (I don't pretend to know which solution this is, though 
it sounds like Arch's current init system, or systemd, are likely to be 
default in the next year or two.)

After writing the above, I checked my assumptions and Google found me 
Remnant's entirely reasonable blog post about systemd. 
http://netsplit.com/2010/04/30/on-systemd/

-Isaac