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Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

Upstart provided comparable service for years. There was no reason to use bash scripts and watchdogs / restarters before.

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Yes, there was a reason: Having to support other distros.

The big deal now is that all the major distributions support the same mechanism.

Which of course still leaves OS X, *bsd, Solaris AFAIK. But it should cut down on the internal Linux incompatibilities a bit. I'm not a fan of systemd, but having one broken standard is much better than having four broken standards :-)

> Which of course still leaves OS X, bsd, Solaris AFAIK.

AFAIUI OS X has launchd, and Solaris has OMF[1]?

... so basically the BSDs are the ones left behind?

[1] I think that is the acronym for Solaris' XML-based standardized system service files? (I don't care that they're XML. It care that they're standardized.)

Solaris 10 and 11 have SMF

Ah, SMF, that was it! Thanks

Thinking that the BSDs have been left behind is to erroneously presume that the BSDs ran System 5 rc in the first place. They did not. Most of them use Mewburn rc (or their own reinvented version thereof), which was invented almost a decade after van Smoorenburg rc, which itself was invented about half a decade after System 5 rc.

Here's a "portable" script for van Smoorenburg rc that ports to 4 Linux families, complete with the sort of case statements that I described in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10357589 :

* http://conman.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/etc/conman.init.in

Here's a Mewburn rc script:

* http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/~checkout~/src/etc/rc.d/...

I'm talking about the time when other distros were already on systemd, but ubuntu wasn't. Of course we needed shell scripts before that.

Except upstart actually allowed shell code in its configuration files[1]. Now, it did have the "exec" stanza which was far cleaner, but if you look through what Ubuntu actually did in practice, I think you'll find quite a lot of "script" stanzas in there.

[1] http://upstart.ubuntu.com/cookbook/#script

That was always an option. It's the same for systemd - you can always configure: `ExecStart=/etc/init.d/something start`. But the context of the comment was - you as a developer writing the config. And you can do it the modern/proper way instead with both upstart and systemd.

> It's the same for systemd - you can always configure: `ExecStart=/etc/init.d/something start`.

Yes, but you cannot embed shell script directly in the job/service definition... thus making the "good path" simpler and more natural, which is a Big Deal(TM) in software usability. (As evidenced by the fact that many many upstart jobs on Ubuntu at least used "script" sections.)

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