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Comment by JdeBP | Hacker News Reader

It's highly misleading to state that one will not miss "simple System V init" from FreeBSD, because it is a falsehood by implication.

One of the things that characterizes the BSDs is that they never had AT&T System 5 init, nor the van Smoorenburg clone thereof for Minix+Linux. It's one of the things that the BSD side of the universe resisted from the AT&T side of the universe back in the 1980s. FreeBSD has BSD init, a rather different beast to AT&T init, and Mewburn rc, which is very different to van Smoorenburg rc (although the post-2014 revisions on Debian make van Smoorenburg rc come closer) on Linux.

And it's equally misleading to talk about liking your dæmons restarting themselves, because that's untrue too. systemd is the very third party monitor, externally monitoring and restarting the dæmon programs so that they do not have to restart themselves, that you claim to want to do without.

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Sorry, I don't care about branding semantics.

The difference between inittab and the scripts controlling the startup routines are minimal. A person in 2005 could grasp the difference between BSD and Linux init scripts in about an hour.

As for hating systemd, that battle is lost, my friend. There's really no point in even engaging any discussion about it beyond this paragraph. No one is looking to write shell scripts for init in 2020 when there are systemd service files that are simple configs. It's provided by the distro, that's why it's adoptable. No one in the right mind trusts open source project devs to maintain compatibility in even minor version variations, that's why there's a booming container business. Tools that the distro provides work, tools from third parties are on borrowed time until they break, so yes systemd is the only viable up-monitoring solution.

Nothing there follows from what I wrote, or even from what you yourself wrote earlier, for that matter; and the idea that the difference between inittab and rc is "minimal", when the quite marked difference between init and rc has been a fundamental Unix thing since First Edition, is laughable and gives away the entire lack of foundation here. One never has "written shell scripts for init", moreover. You really do not have any sort of grasp of what you are talking about, and the "hating systemd" strawman that you just introduced out of thin air to then argue against is indicative of at best a lack of technical points to make.

For those following along, and just realizing that RNCTX's opinions are at best ill-informed and ill-founded and who want to learn from a better source, FreeBSD has quite informative manual entries for init(8) and rc(8). You can read about Mewburn rc, as used on FreeBSD, in the doco that is hyperlinked at http://jdebp.uk./FGA/system-5-rc-problems.html . And you can learn what replaced the actual AT&T Unix System 5 init/rc, before Linux even existed at http://jdebp.uk./FGA/unix-service-access-facility.html , http://jdebp.uk./FGA/inittab-getty-is-history.html , and http://jdebp.uk./FGA/run-levels-are-history.html . You can even read how systemd is the very third-party restarter that RNCTX doesn't want dæmons to have in Lennart Poettering's own words at http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html .

Many people have rejected the systemd cult of bloat and scripts are easy to read, write, understand, and maintain. Most consist of generic boilerplate anyway.

Nobody wants to replace a simple init system with something with 1.5 million lines of code like systemd. For crying out loud, it’s 2020.

There are two errors here.

First, there's the error of the false dichotomy that the only two options that exist are van Smoorenburg rc and systemd. That's certainly not true for FreeBSD, which is the headlined topic, and not true on Linux operating systems, either. The Uselessd Guy famously called this false dichotomy out years ago. Moreover, in the Debian Hoo-Hah the choice was primarily amongst OpenRC, Upstart, and systemd; van Smoorenburc rc was acknowledged by all as not even in the running in practical terms, even though it formally was.

Second, FreeBSD has Mewburn rc, and one really cannot apply the same critique to it as to the van Smoorenburg rc for Minix+Linux, in discussions pro or discusssions con. The scripts are vastly different in structure. (Ironically, it is little known that Debian people have local modifications to van Smoorenburg rc, from 2014 back in the time of the Hoo-Hah, that make huge changes to van Smoorenburg rc scripts on Debian, making them structured much more along the lines of how Mewburn rc and OpenRC structure rc scripts.) In Mewburn rc, scripts actually do not mostly consist of generic boilerplate. The generic parts are not in the scripts in the first place, but in a common shell script function library.

Is this what they call pilpul? Neat.

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