[arch-general] When will Arch switch to Systemd

[C Anthony Risinger]

On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 9:12 PM, Cody Maloney
<cmaloney at theoreticalchaos.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 6:22 PM, C Anthony Risinger <anthony at extof.me> wrote:
>>
>> ... so, anyone out there to support or refute this observation (with actual
>> experience ...)
>
> Better is a matter of opinion. From what I've gathered about systemd
> it makes a lot of things a lot better/simpler/cleaner, and seems to be
> fairly sensibly put together.

don't forget things that were previously not possible! like verifiable
boot, reliable kill/term/reload (WITHOUT cooperation from the child
process), and resource limiting for example... all of which are rather
important for servers :-)

> Systemd definitely gets a lot right, and I do use
> it some on my desktops which already have a strong dependency on
> D-Bus.

arch desktops?  could you elaborate more here; how is the experience?

> I could see possibly trying to build a non-bash/sysv init
> system for Arch to provide much of what systemd provides

i don't understand what you mean here... reinvent an application that
currently gaining much traction/backing?  why?

> but I don't
> like bringing in D-Bus as a core system dependency to do so. I like
> KISS, and D-Bus (at least in its current state), just doesn't fit into
> my interpretation of KISS on any machine.

i just did a quick check on dbus-core.  minus all the man pages,
headers, etc. you are left with a single dynamic library, and 5
binaries.  these combined weigh in at a whopping half a MB (yes,
that's 0.5MB :-).

what's not kiss about that?

i guess i think dbus is pretty awesome.  quite frankly, i love linux
but i'm tired of editing 1000s of different kinds of config files with
different syntax, and disparate methods for doing every little thing.
it's a high speed bus that lets me use language <insert here> to speak
to many different running applications, independent of the
application's language, reliably and effectively.  things like
libvirt/policykit are very important to my personal/professional uses
of linux, at home and company.  i don't see dbus going away anytime
soon, and honestly i hope it becomes integrated into everything and
becomes integral to the linux experience, because from a development
point of view it adds a lot of flexibility to grow and introspect,
with little if any drawbacks (though i could very well be missing
something).

> D-Bus has directly reduced both the predictability and stability of my machines,
> ...
> for the time being, it has caused me nothing but problems.

how so?  if you mean applications changing their interface, this
really isn't dbus's fault.  could you elaborate more?  i have many
systems and custom scripts that rely on it in one way or another and i
haven't experienced any issues.

thanks for your response; it's well appreciated.

C Anthony