[arch-general] When will Arch switch to Systemd

[Rogutės Sparnuotos]

C Anthony Risinger (2011-01-20 11:45):
> i shot of a couple emails to drum up some comments regarding this
> proposal.  to recap, here are some observations/pros/cons, feel free
> to add/remove/review/dispute because try as i might, i'm biased; let
> me be the first to say it :-)
> 
> sysvinit [ PROS ]
> ) familiarity
> ) zero dependencies
> ) already works
> ) bash (is this even a pro?)
> ) ... i'm having a hard time here ....
> 
> sysvinit [ CONS ]
> ) provides no information about boot
> ) relies on mountains of external bash scripts
> ) zero reliability or control over process once they start
> ) no real functionality at all tbh (is this biased? ... no :-)
> 
> systemd [PROS]
> ) lightweight dependencies (DBUS)
> ) internal/fast handling of menial startup/teardown duties
> ) handling of complexities like RAID and LVM consistently? (verify?)
> ) will soon (or already) unify automatic process launch in general (cron/etc)
> ) verifiable boot (systemadm)
> ) introspective via DBUS
> ) accurate and precise kill/reload/restart (first time ever on linux!)
> ) resource limiting and monitoring of whole process groups! (via the
> cgroups, another first!)
> ) service rules for how to handle OOM and other nasties
> ) socket/bus/FS activation (implicit dependencies)
> ) boot tracing/stepping (interactive boot, once service at a time)
> ) significant peerstream (fedora/etc) support and force behind the project
> ) very complete Arch integrations! yay!
> 
> sysvinit [ CONS ]
> ) non-zero dependencies
> ) newer, less production experience
> ) some missing unit/service files (which?)
> ) rc.conf either needs to go, or we find a way to update systemd when
> it changes...

systemd requires newest releases of Linux kernel, dbus, udev and
util-linux-ng. An optional GUI (the systemadm you mentioned) even requires
GTK-3. Hopefully this will not be a problem by the time it gets stable.
Otherwise you will have to forget about servers.

One more CON: systemd uses ~25 small binaries instead of a couple of shell
scripts like /etc/rc.sysinit. The source of these binaries is lacking
comments. Consequently, you have to be very good with C to improve
anything. Read: the boot process becomes opaque. Enterprise scale
administration becomes easier at the cost of system simplicity. There can
be no KISS in an environment running systemd, dbus, policykit etc.

-- 
--  Rogutės Sparnuotos