Re: A few observations about systemd
Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org> writes:
> No. systemd wants to throw out init scripts, because they are shell
> scripts, and Shell Scripts Are Bad!!!1!! oh noes.
I don't get that impression. Rather, I think both systemd and upstart
want to significantly reduce the involvement of shell scripts in the boot
process for the same reason that I'd love to have the time to eliminate a
lot of them from Debian package maintainer scripts: using a (rather quirky
with interesting portability issues) Turing-complete programming language
is only a good idea when you're doing things that require that power. The
rest of the time, it's much harder to analyze, much less adaptable (you're
often duplicating work in every separate script because helper systems
lag, and if there's a bug, you have to fix it everywhere instead of in one
place), more complicated, and gives people enough freedom to get
themselves into trouble.
Falling back on such a language when you have to do something really
complicated is a good thing to support, but most of the time, you really
want to use a simple, declarative language that says what you're trying to
do and then implement the tools and support to accomplish that in one,
well-tested place.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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