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No, Upstart’s design was so bad that even Scott James Remnant (the creator of Upstart) admitted it’s design was inherently flawed.

The biggest problem with Upstart was that it put the dependency chain upside down and just started a service whenever it’s dependencies were fulfilled, no matter whether it actually made sense to start the service.

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I remember reading about it and thought it seemed wrong, but presumably the author did his research and knew what he was doing. Oh well. His attitude and the readability of Upstart code were very good, though.

The Upstart design was probably easier to implement. With the systemd design, the dependency tree needs to be traversed bottom up (figure out what needs to be started to start the targeted set of services), then top down (start dependees when dependencies are ready). With Upstart, top down was enough. Or so it seems.

Do you have a source on SJR stating that the event based design was inherently flawed?

I think the comments towards the bottom of this thread is what is being referred to: https://web.archive.org/web/20140928104327if_/https://plus.g...

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