Re: Please stop hating on sysvinit (was Re: do packages depend on lexical order or {daily,weekly,monthly} cron jobs?)

[Michael Stone <mstone@debian.org>]

On Thu, Aug 08, 2019 at 01:08:41PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Simon Richter <sjr@debian.org> writes:
>
> > In the same way, we could have had automatic restart of services through
> > sysvinit easily: an include mechanism that allows additional inittab
> > lines to be pulled from /etc/inittab.d/* would be trivial to
> > implement. That it hasn't been done is not because no one has thought
> > about it in the last thirty years, but because its use is rather
> > limited.
>
> Er, well... speaking as someone who tried to keep daemons running via
> inittab and then gave up and tried using monit for a while, and then
> switched to djb daemontools (all back before systemd existed), I'm not
> sure this is quite right.  Those who tried to use this facility quickly
> discovered that sysvinit was rather bad at it, and therefore started using
> something else.

Yup. Regardless of those who keep insisting that systemd doesn't add 
anything to a server environment, people happily using it for servers 
disagree. I assume those who insist that sysvinit did everything right 
simply either forget the problems it had or just accepted its 
limitations.

> Note that this is not a statement about Linux sysvinit specifically -- my
> experiences were originally on Solaris.  The flaws in using inittab to
> keep services running were universal among UNIX implementations.

And until we got rid of legacy limitations, there was no way forward 
because everything was met with "but this is how its always worked and 
you'll never manage to change things on those other systems".