Re: Bug#727708: systemd (security) bugs (was: init system question)

[Steven Chamberlain <steven@pyro.eu.org>]

As a system administrator, the idea of a 'kitchen sink' init system
terrifies me.  I would need exceptionally high confidence in its authors
and design principles before allowing it to run as root on my systems
and depend on it to boot even to single user.  I wouldn't even invest
much time enquiring into this, if I knew I could manage with something
simpler having less scope for security/reliability bugs.

OTOH I would be much more forgiving if this were being used for, say,
employees' own desktop machines in a protected corporate IT environment.
 Lots of systemd's features seem particularly convenient for that use
case.  And security is enforced in other ways there (the only people
with access at all, know they risk getting fired for trying to escalate
privileges or DoS).

Adopting systemd may have been much simpler if it had been separate from
and launched by the simple init, starting only the services that have
unit files because they really require its functionality.  If no
installed software on that system needs it, it wouldn't even need to be
installed.

But otherwise I think there are GNU/Linux users who want the choice of
using systemd or being able to use something else.  Preferably without
having to switch a different distro or third-party derivative.

Regards,
-- 
Steven Chamberlain
steven@pyro.eu.org