[arch-general] SystemD poll

[Anthony ''Ishpeck'' Tedjamulia]

On Sat, Aug 18, 2012 at 12:03:55PM +0100, Geoff wrote:
> As I have said in a previous post, I arrived in linux a little later than you,
> but for much the same reasons. On "KISS" / "The Arch Way" / "Unix philosophy"
> etc, it seems to me that here as in my own field (law), maxims make good
> servants but poor masters.

This is a sound observation. We should all avoid evoking slogans
for their own sake.  But in software, we have the luxury of some
of our cliches having a more cogent, annotative meaning.

>  Ultimately, every decision has to be evaluated as
> good or bad in its own right. 

Indeed.  This is the discussion afoot.  How tightly coupled can
we afford to make any piece of software?

When one cde base manages mounting filesystems, daemon startup,
service dependencies, and the like, how does this affect the 
software ecosystem as a whole?  What technologies become easier
or harder to adopt and why?

systemd strikes me, based on my experience, as too centralized
to give the flexibility that *nix has been famous for.  I may
be totally off my rocker on this one.  That's what I have come
to believe as I have been forced to deal with it and te plethora
of other startup systems that we use at work.

Dev here is right that init scripts are worse (as is upstart,
IMHO), but the praise leveled on systemd by its proponents
(even the casual ones) is disproportionate to the gains from
using it.