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Comment by irthomasthomas | Hacker News Reader

1.5M lines of code is not an init system, it is a time bomb... and with dodgy wiring.

I think it was a ZFS dev who complained he had to update 150 files to port ZFS to systemd. Simples?

And you have to love all them binary log files, with their dynamic and spontaneus api. Yes, everything is always new and exciting with systemD.

I use devuan. A debian fork with a choice of init systems (well, everything but systemD. ;) It took the dev/devs 2 years just to swap out/revert the init system.

Also, just learned devuan's website is JS and cookie free. https://www.devuan.org/

Edit: I will concede that systemD is great for a lot of people. I honestly wish them success. The work that goes in to building, maintaining, and using it, is substantial. It must be a boon for the economy and job creation.

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> 1.5M lines of code is not an init system, it is a time bomb... and with dodgy wiring.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21935186

Oh that's rich. That is rich. The [Flagged] tag is what really makes it. I'm tempted to screenshot that post and make an NFT from it. It really does capture something about the zeitgeist.

Seriously, though, read the article. The 1.2M lines includes removed lines from refactoring. So, it is not completely made up, as implied in that comment. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=systemd-...

Is this better?

https://twitter.com/pid_eins/status/1214268577509003266

https://www.phoronix.com/misc/systemd-eoy2019/files.html

Including the number of lines in static tables and documentation hardly seems like a meaningful comparison.

Don't make a mistake, systemd is not (just) an init system. It's a replacement of more and more Linux userland. I suppose later on it will replace much of the filesystem, network, and process security management tools, stuff like xattrs, ip / ipfw, and selinux.

I suppose that the end goal of the systemd project is an ability to deploy a production Linux system with just systemd and busybox, and run all software from containers.

Not that it's a bad thing to strive for. But it's not going to be Unix as we know it.

> But it's not going to be Unix as we know it.

Right, that's Plan9.

Plan9 is different in many core concepts. I didn't notice that systemd creates new file systems or allows to mount resources over the network.

(Yes, I do regret that Linux was a hyper-succesful project that replicated Unix, not Plan9. But Plan9 is more complex, maybe it was just infeasible.)

> It's a replacement of more and more Linux userland.

To be more specific is it a replacement of more and more Linux userland that nobody asked. I would be ok if systemd would be a process management system that replaces init with a standardised way of managing services (it would be amazing if it was written a safe language, if it was respecting configuration files, if it did not take over managing system limits, etc. etc.).

Unfortunately it is trying to do too much.

Re nobody asked: I suppose that Red Hat and IBM sales departments sort of did, maybe the embedded teams did, too. Also, the Gnome team forced it on the desktop.

(I'm still able to run Void Linux as my primary desktop without systemd.)

The result of this is that many of the big companies have their own linux distro.

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