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Comment by msgodel | Hacker News Reader

OpenRC is great, there's just no flashy marketing behind it or team of consultants pushing it.

EDIT: Heh. At least I can debug a shell script, I can't debug a config file.

I think this is a fundamental disagreement many people have in what's ultimately desirable when designing software. I personally can't stand non-trivial config files and both at work and at home have wasted way too much time pulling apart software consuming them.

The problem with systemd is that, because of all the new userspace APIs it adds, we can't just agree to disagree. You either target a Systemd OS and the users get to suffer non-trivial, often broken, configs or you target a normal GNU/Linux OS and the systemd users suffer all kinds of surprises when systemd rug pulls them.

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#!/sbin/openrc-run

depend() { need net }

# Export some ENVs for it export SERVER_ADDRESS="0.0.0.0:8088"

name="my-program" description="My program" command="/usr/local/bin/my-program" # If it does not know how to background iself command_background=true pidfile="/run/${RC_SVCNAME}.pid" # To have logs output_log="/var/log/${RC_SVCNAME}.log" error_log="/var/log/${RC_SVCNAME}.err"

It seems that it still uses Turing-complete shell scripts as configuration. Hard pass.

what is... actually wrong with that?

it works, it's extensible, and a simple service is just as declarative as systemd, but when you need to do something more complex (e.g. checking conditions before starting), you don't need to create a separate script to do so or pile up 10 ExecStartPre lines, just `start_pre() { ... }` away

i've seen people again and again complain of "but shell scripts", while the default functions provide an interface with declarative variables right there, what is the actual issue with it?

That it is a Turing complete language and now people can add all sorts of crazy logic

I don’t want to have to evaluate a shell script to figure out how a system service is supposed to start

and how is that any different from system services doing `ExecStartPre=/usr/libexec/my_setup_script.sh`? or worse, 20 different `ExecStartPre` lines that basically build a shell script in the ini file, one line at a time

services are not simply a set of knobs to start a single process, often they don't even have processes (e.g. wg-quick)

and even when they do, it often involves setup, and sometimes cleanup.

systemd has to provide the exact same functionality, even if they put a .ini-paint of coat in it -- the difference is that openrc doesn't make services install N helpers scripts for that. Really, "Not being turing complete" is a useless metric for "stopping complexity in init setups"

the way you stop complexity is by giving pre-configured functionality that is easy to use. systemd did that very well, openrc does do that for a lot of things already, and we're adding more as we see the common need of init scripts for said features

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