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Comment by foldr | Hacker News Reader

It makes it a lot easier to set up a service than System V init. Writing a service file is much easier and less error prone than writing shell scripts.

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syn0byte explicitly said "any number of other init systems", and was clearly trying to avoid people trotting out, as you and several others have, the tired old fallacy, called out by the Uselessd Guy long since, of assuming that only systemd and van Smoorenburg init+rc exist ...

* http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8488235)

* https://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/09/05/0/

* http://jdebp.eu./FGA/run-scripts-and-service-units-side-by-s...

... and then calling the latter "System V init", when AT&T System V had actually adopted a new system with separate system and service management several years before Linux was even invented.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18788974

I took syn0byte to be asking for an example of an init system that systemd is better than. I can't really see any other interpretation of their comment.

>and then calling the latter "System V init",

This is what everyone calls it in the context of Linux init systems. You may not like that particular piece of terminology, but please don't give me a hard time for following the standard usage.

> I can't really see any other interpretation of their comment.

Then you are unable to distinguish singulars from plurals.

No, the comment asks whether it's better than any number of other init systems. In other words, whether there are any other init systems that it's better than. So a counterexample could be a single init system. I see no other sensible interpretation of the sentence. Could you paraphrase what you take it to mean?

"any other init system..." originally included "...besides an ancient SysV strawman." but I removed it because it seemed overly snarky.

Having written and dealt with both; It's about equal in my time and effort to write either in sh or windows ini/'unit' files.

If you claim that System V init is just as good as systemd, then it is a relevant comparison rather than a straw man, no? In many cases there were a substantial number of people who wanted to keep System V init rather than move to systemd (e.g. https://wiki.debian.org/Debate/initsystem/sysvinit).

System V init wasn't an ancient straw man for Debian users. It was the init system that systemd replaced.

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