Re: [Lennart Poettering] Re: A few observations about systemd
Steve Langasek <vorlon <at> debian.org> writes:
> I'm sure that systemd does much better than a traditional sysvinit boot with
> /bin/bash and no dependency-based booting. But then, so does Debian's
> current boot system, and so does upstart; and neither of the latter two
> involve grandiose claims of a "shell-free boot". Trying to take the shell
> completely out of the boot means a definite tradeoff here between boot speed
> and configurability/maintainability, and in the absence of hard numbers, I
Tradeoff? What tradeoff? Sysv-style init scripts are messy, definitely not
maintainable, and theoretically configurable in the "turing-complete" sense but
hard to modify in practice. systemd service configuration wins in boot speed,
wins big in maintainability, and is at least equal in configurability (you can
configure most things easier than with shell scripts, but can still fall back to
them if necessary).
> > Juliusz practices misleading anti-advertising [1], likes to ignore the
> > fact that all major distros either made systemd the default or include
> > it in their distro with the exception of Ubuntu.
>
> Well, it's nice to see that Lennart is at least acknowledging Ubuntu as a
> major distribution these days, unlike in some of his earlier rhetoric. ;)
>
> Though this is still a pretty misleading comment, since both of these
> statements are also true:
>
> All major distros either made sysvinit the default or include it in their
> distro.
>
> All major distros either made upstart the default or include it in their
> distro.
It's not that misleading after all when you consider how quickly systemd has
reached that position. It was only published last year. To have reached its
current position already shows a lot of momentum.
Sysvinit is the old default, but nobody seriously claims it's gaining ground.
Upstart is still used in Ubuntu but doesn't seem to have much future elsewhere.
There's quite a lot of interest in systemd for Debian too, whereas I've seen few
people express interest in Upstart. The interest is especially low when you
consider Debian's ties with Ubuntu and people who only care about Upstart
because of that.
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