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Comment by sverige | Hacker News Reader

The last time I set up a Linux box, it used SysV init. I know there are others, but I was under the impression that SysV was sort of the default. It was kind of a pain as I recall, but not terrible. But I wasn't managing dozens or hundreds of boxes, so maybe I didn't really feel the pain that presumably caused someone to come up with this solution.

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Where gerdesj says "Miguel's method", xe is talking about the init and rc system written by Miquel van Smoorenberg (originally for Minix and later ported to Linux) that copied some, but far from all, of AT&T System 5 init, rc, and adjuncts.

gerdesj is specifically referring to the well-known problem that the helper utilities and functions for rc scripts varied wildly from operating system to operating system.

It's worth noting that the Debian people introduced another set of conventions recently, in 2014, with rc scripts in the Debian variant of the van Smoorenburg system now interpreted by a /lib/init/init-d-script command instead of a shell.

* http://jdebp.eu./FGA/system-5-rc-problems.html

* http://jdebp.eu./FGA/inittab-getty-is-history.html

* https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/480896/5132

Thanks for filling in the bits I missed out. I think that MvS did a remarkable job back in the day and that vision and framework has lasted a very, very long time.

Times have changed. My laptop that travels around a bit with funky VPN and proxy requirements is not the same beast as my desktop or server of years ago. Random bits of hardware get stuffed into it and pulled out with scant regard for common decency.

systemd is without doubt a bit odd in places (I'm a Brit and have experience of odd) but it provides a pretty decent approach to a PID 1 experience in the modern dynamic world.

The problem with Sysvinit is that while there was not one sysvinit, but many forks, and even more script libraries for the init scripts. You did not stand a chance to have a native (using the systems' shell libraries) init script that would work on different systems.

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