[arch-general] [arch-dev-public] Migration to systemd

[Brandon Watkins]

On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 11:55 AM, Calvin Morrison <mutantturkey at gmail.com>wrote:

> On 14 August 2012 10:57, Stéphane Gaudreault <stephane at archlinux.org>
> wrote:
> > Systemd has a overall better design than SysV, lots of useful
> administrative
> > features and provide quicker boot up. Considering that it has been
> around in
> > our repositories for some time and that it could be considered stable
> enough
> > for production use, I would suggest to replace iniscript by systemd once
> the
> > 'Missing systemd units' is over. Thus we will avoid duplicating our
> efforts
> > on two init systems.
> >
> > Any objections to start the migration process ?
> >
> > Cheers,
> >
> > Stéphane
> >
> >
>
> I'd love to see the overall advantages and disadvantages of each of
> those fleshed out on a page where I can read them - I know I can't
> order anyone to do it, and my comment doesn't effect the outcome, but
> I would really like to see a good explanation of the advantages in an
> unbiased (aka not by LP) explanation  of why it is better for arch. Is
> systemd suckless? is it easy to maintain? is it going to around for
> several years? have we considered Upstart? what about OpenRC?
>
> before Arch jump ship, I would love to see some good details. I have
> been trying to keep up Tom's posts on the general, so maybe I should
> revisit them.
>
> Calvin
>
Systemd isn't going anywhere anytime soon, its going to be adopted by RHEL
(which means it would also be adopted by RHEL derivatives like CentOS), and
its being adopted by major distros like fedora, opensuse, mageia etc...
>From what I've read systemd seems to have more active development and have
a more modern design than upstart that allows for more parallelism during
boot (even driven vs socket driven) I'm sure there's someone that can
explain that better than me though.

On the developer side, I'm sure it will make things easier for the arch
devs using the upstream "standard" init system, because it wil be well
tested across many distros. Also from what I've heard the systemd
developers have been quite friendly making fixes to systemd so that it
better supports arch.

On the user-side I find systemd much easier to maintain my system with than
sysvinit. I find the service files a lot cleaner and easier to understand
than initscripts (service files are also portable so they can be included
with upstream packages).