This. The FreeBSD rc system just works, is well documented and is small enough to understand by one person without too much effort.
With FreeBSD, my impression is that manual shell scripting is still the norm. Integrating RCTL (FreeBSD's resource-limiting facility) with service management basically consists of manually writing in a bunch of imperative calls to RCTL into scripts. There's no way to configure services with limits declaratively, ensure the right thing happens when services are started/stopped, etc., precisely because there's no integration between the RCTL facility and the process-management or init facilities. Or at least I haven't found a way. The closest is that if you need such integration only for jails, you do have the option of third-party "monolithic" management systems, such as CBSD.
I will also add that managing disparate platforms is never a reality from experience. There are perhaps two core platforms at a company and they are migrated together in blocks, all together. For us, we have a couple of legacy Ubuntu machines that are being canned this month. Everything else is Windows 2012 R2 and FreeBSD 10.
The "systemd way" is to provide a monolithic abstraction over many things with a DBus API. It's the equivalent of adding WMI and a registry to a Unix platform i.e. it's against the fundamental tenets of the operating system. Having managed windows systems for years, this is really not something I want to see. Time will tell, but if I'm not right about that then I'll eat all three of my hats.
And yes I have experience with systemd as well through evaluation of RHEL7. Within two hours, I'd hit a wall with timedatectl enabling NTP on the machine. The steps to debug the mess were horrible and the issue eventually just spontaneously disappeared.
That's reminiscent of the stateful nature of windows which brings back many years of pain in the 1990's and 00's for me.
Isn't there a bunch of fine print that goes along with that?
>Alpine Linux
How? The installer doesn't even work.
It would be a step backwards: it is simpler, and does less stuff, so booting would be slower and some features are missing.
My BSD systems boot quickly enough for me.
It's pretty dumb, and not enough of a problem for me that I'd figure out how to work around it, but it's a pretty good example.
http://askubuntu.com/questions/63456/waiting-for-network-con...
My experience is that a substantial amount of time is wasted weeding out undesired timeouts in startup scripts, because they lead to increasing downtime.
defaultrouter="NO"
My BSD systems (not front-facing and therefore on a lesser patch cycle) rarely get rebooted and neither do the processes so this is indeed moot for me.
Proof:
http://i.imgur.com/tZsM82Q.png
Yes that's a memcached uptime on a host that has had 10,185,367,932 cache hits...
OpenBSD however works wonderfully.
Also there are some peculiarities in the way the LSB init script compatibility is implemented in systemd: it tries to be 'smart' and remember their state. So you start an init script, and it failed for some reason / perhaps even exited with an error code, perhaps you are still developing that init script. Now fixing the problem and running the init script / systemctl start doesn't even try to run the script because it thinks it has run it yet. You first have to tell it to stop it (which fails), and only then you can run it again.
Also I care about being able to use my computer and for the first in 15 years a systemd update caused my computer to needlessly dropping into systemd emergency mode at boot and this emergency mode being broken I was effectively locked out of my computer because an optional external usb drive that was defined in fstab with no issue for a couple years now required a nofail option. Now consider that this computer is located in a remote location 1000 km away from where I live.
To me systemd already caused way more very real problems I do care a great deal about than it has solved reducing boot time by a few seconds is not something I care that much about.
I just want to get shit done and solve problems and anything that risks that gets outed now.
FreeBSD hits the sweet spot, probably followed by NetBSD.
It's pretty clear how that's going to shake out, isn't it? Google is pretty much a non-issue here; yes, Android and ChromeOS use a Linux kernel base, but they have no impact on any mainline distros, and there's no indication Google wants them to. So it reduces down to two parties fighting for control: Canonical and Red Hat. And Red Hat is going to win. Canonical doesn't have the resources to go its own way on more than a handful of fronts (this is why when Debian switched to systemd Upstart was killed off; Canonical is far too reliant on Debian as an upstream to fight every issue), and their requirement for a CLA to accept anyone else's code means they are entirely reliant on their own coders, as nobody wants to sign Canonical's CLAs. We'll see how long they can stick it out on Mir, but they don't have the resources to fight a war with Red Hat on two fronts, so that's the only issue I expect to see them fighting over.
Creeping up on their arses is Microsoft (again) with Azure and incredibly cheap commercial offerings.
For my part, I agree that binary logs was not necessary, though I've yet to encounter any issues with it, and journald certainly does provide a lot of functionality that makes it more pleasant to deal with logs than before. All of that could have been achieved while retaining text logs, though. But at the same time, it is still trivial to log to text files by telling journald to log to syslog if that matters to you.
Other things I do care about include getting rid of init scripts - that is a persistent source of problems. I'm inclined to believe not a single one of them are bug free, though that's probably a bit uncharitable. Unit files helps. So does cgroup containment to rid us of the abomination that is the need to rely on pid-files and hope that works reliably (it doesn't, since pretty much nobody are through enough when writing init scripts). Other things include better recoverability in cases where critical processes gets killed, and well thought out handling of early stage logging. And things like systemd-cgtop and systemd-cgls are nice.
I'm sure we'll eventually get solutions that split more of this functionality out into more cleanly separate components, and that'll be great, but until then I'm happy to stay with systemd.
As for the problems you ran into, that sucks, but any large change like this will have painful teething problems and they're not a good basis for judging whether it's a good long term solution - I've had plenty of boot failures caused by problems with init scripts as well.
Boot time is a long way down the list of benefits for me too - most of our servers have uptimes measured in years, and even my home laptop usually goes a month or two between reboots.