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Comment by rcarmo | Hacker News Reader

First they came for PID 1, and we were silent.

Oh, wait, we weren't. But although I don't miss the rickety init scripts, I've grown more and more worried about stuff like this, enough to ponder replacements (in Go or Python, which seem to be generally acceptable for systems software these days).

Ignoring for the moment the usual biases against Python, how feasible/how much support would it be/have to build something to replace systemd (by having PID 1 do the minimum possible, in C, and having the rest done with Python)?

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I've been working at a Docker shop for a while and I have a feeling it will be the future for running services. It makes systemd somewhat irrelevant.

There are still a lot of issues I've had with Docker, which I won't go into. It also can't replace everything running on your Linux system. But it's a neat idea and big players use it in production for huge workloads.

Now the whole AWS-containers, docker-machine, swarm, mesos, coreos, kubernetes thing is a cluster fuck of choices .. but you have choices. And unlike running an Ansible script on some provides base image (which is totally different from Rackspace, Linode, etc.), you are guaranteed your container will work on any docker engine with little modification (your orchestration files may change though).

I have a feeling, for better or worse, containers will be the future and will stick around long after systemd hopefully dies.

Nah, systemd is angling to supplant docker for containers.

There is already a great deal of bad blood between the two because of the reworked cgroups management.

And there is also the likes of CoreOS that is basically systemd-the-distro.

Never mind that we have the likes of xdg-app/flatpak that is basically aiming for what you are thinking about, and it is systemd dependent.

It was quite amusing seeing systemd causing systemd-specific trouble in CoreOS development though, such as systemd requiring too much privilege when running inside container. Many people just use s6 happily.

The schadenfreude is real.

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