[arch-general] [Bulk] Re: RFC: OpenRC as init system for Arch

[Tom Gundersen]

On Sun, Apr 29, 2012 at 6:51 AM, Patrick Lauer <patrick at gentoo.org> wrote:
> The sysvinit code is so "boring" that there are still typos in the
> comments because not enough people even look at it to notice ...

The lack of maintenance of sysvinit is a bit worrying, isn't it?

>> i write a lot of shell code, and have literally read the bash man page
>> enough times to be able to jump to any point for reference ... shell
>> code is anything but secure and rather fragile.  it's just not meant
>> to do as much as we make it.  you are probably right about the
>> firewall case, maybe it wouldn't be needed.  but my guess is that you
>> could actually make the firewall much more fault tolerant and
>> intelligent by using such a powerful supervisor as systemd.  for the
>> most part though, most systems *do* require intricate and complex
>> relationships between services, and systemd fills that need
>> splendidly, *because* it does more that "fire and forget" [initialize]
>> processes.
> Worse than OpenRC, especially as it has insane nuggets like "WantedBy"
> (hello threaded Intercal!)

What's wrong with WantedBy? You don't like the term, or do you have a
technical problem with it?

> In my opinion,  if I have to start hacking random C to add or adapt
> features (which happens as soon as the builtins do the wrong things -
> that's about twice a year for me) it'll be a lot more crashy than a
> simple shell script where I add one line of code.

By "builtins" do you mean PID1? If so, this is not something an admin
should be hacking on (just like an admin would not hack on sysvinit's
/sbin/init). Have you actually looked at the code?

> So the only weak argument in favour of systemd is dependency handling,
> which has been around for a decade. Oh, and if you have stateful init
> scripts (yeah, radical, I know) you can just check if all services you
> wanted to start are started and still alive. (running "rc-status" and
> "rc" with openrc does exactly that)

As has been mentioned by several people in this thread, and also on
the other lists where you sent your proposal: the main reason people
are interested in systemd is due to its event-driven design (similar
to upstart, but unlike sysvinit and, as far as I can tell, OpenRC).

-t