Re: A few observations about systemd
Guus Sliepen <guus@debian.org> writes:
> I would hardly call that a suitable comparison. How hard can it be to
> support both sysvinit and systemd?
For everything in Debian? Unless you're willing to write init scripts and
cripple systemd by making it use init scripts, it's a huge pain, since you
have to maintain two parallel init setups for every package requiring
something to run at boot, one of which will probably never be tested by
the maintainer.
The same issue applies with upstart, of course. Both systems support
old-style init scripts, but one of the huge motivations for switching init
systems is to *stop using* old-style init scripts, since they support a
tiny fraction of the capabilities of systemd or upstart and are massively
annoying and tricky to maintain in a bug-free fashion.
> It's just two little files to maintain instead of one. We also have/had
> both .menu and .desktop files.
This is widely considered a bug, and is frequently discussed on
debian-devel as a bug.
> If you think your comparison is suitable, then are you suggesting we do
> something as difficult as moving from .deb format to .rpm?
If RPM were technically superior to .deb, we should at least consider it,
although the amount of work required is much larger than supporting
another init system. (As it turns out, I think it's technically
*inferior*, so I don't see much reason to consider it.)
We should be striving to use the best technical solution to the available
problem, not just continuing with whatever we did in the past.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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