Bug#727708: init system other points, and conclusion
Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:
> Firstly, unlike the systemd maintainers, I think portability to
> non-Linux systems is important. It may be that our existing non-Linux
> ports are not very widely used, undermained, and/or not of production
> quality. However, I think it is important for us to keep those options
> open. Of course that provides a space for people to work on them and
> use them, directly, but more importantly it keeps Debian's options open
> for the future. And the competition helps keep Linux honest, which is
> important because Linux is effectively unforkable, has a poor history of
> responsiveness to concerns of some of its downstream userbases, and has
> a nearly-unuseable governance setup.
> This by itself means that systemd would have to have very strong other
> advantages for me to want to choose it. And I recognise that this point
> of view is not necessarily widely shared. However, happily, I find that
> no conflict arises for me between my desire for portability and the
> other relevant criteria.
I find this statement curious, given your recommendation of upstart, since
my understanding is that neither upstart nor systemd have been ported to
non-Linux systems.
Is the porting work started by Dmitrijs Ledkovs farther along than I had
thought? The latest update I heard from November was that he had a fork
of libnih that passed its test suite once several key features were
disabled (inotify, abstract domain sockets), and very little of that work
had been merged upstream. (It's possibly worth noting here that the
libnih upstream and Debian package maintainer is still Scott James
Remnant, who previously expressed skepticism of a straight port to
kFreeBSD.)
I've been giving a lot of thought to the portability issue as well, but
where I'm currently at is rather different than your sentiments above. My
feeling is that there is a slight advantage to upstart here in that the
port has been started, but it's slight. In both cases, there are
Linux-specific APIs embedded deeply in the project, and in both cases
porting would require substantial effort.
The upstart porting effort appears to be working in exactly the right way:
providing functionality in glibc and the kernel on FreeBSD that supports
the APIs that libnih needs. That would also be the first step in porting
systemd to kFreeBSD/glibc. It's great work and benefits both projects as
well as many others, but I'm not sure it's a meaningful discriminator.
I feel like you may be overly optimistic about future development in
upstart and overly pessimistic about future development in systemd here.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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