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Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

I agree. So far I've seen it as a classic conservatives vs. liberals debate. The conservatives have no interest at all in changing the Unix paradigm under Linux. It works perfectly well, thank you. The liberals see it as archaic and unsuited to a wide variety of new use cases including rapid-deployment VMs, containers, mobile and laptop computers, and the desktop in general.

I side with the liberals here, but with a few caveats. I'm not a huge fan of systemd, though I agree that it'll probably get fixed and so far it seems better than the hairy old SysV-init mess.

The debate is doing more harm than even a slightly broken systemd would do-- Linux is already far too fragmented to no benefit. I'm all for freedom but I don't like pointless forks that add nothing.

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“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types -- the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.”

― G.K. Chesterton

How about a third way? If you want to go on making mistakes, do so over there, and only bring it back here when you can prove that it will not blow up in our faces.

Not really, I use a dozen init systems, each for a different situation, and I'm interested in keeping it that way. The problem is that systemd is that is being forcefully pushed to all distros. For instance, by merging udev with systemd.

Maybe those forks don't add nothing for you, but for me they're beneficial, because I think Darwinian evolution also applies to software.

> I use a dozen init systems, each for a different situation, and I'm interested in keeping it that way.

You might like that, but it makes life hell for developers who write and package any kind of daemon/service.

I keep seeing this, and i keep wondering why said developers are doing any packaging at all.

A binary and clear instructions on how it is launched from a command line should suffice for any competent admin.

He should then be able to fit it into the boot scheme of whatever system he is maintaining.

Absolutely not, only if they depend on systemd. If they follow UNIX conventions, they don't need to edit a single file. Writing a daemon init script was a solved problem decades ago, and that script will serve for every init system.

Nope. Some systemd distros do not support daemon init scripts done the old way.

>The conservatives have no interest at all in changing the Unix paradigm under Linux

The unix paradigm doesn't exist under linux. It was dead before linux got started (the kernel, in the early 90s).

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