Ansgar Burchardt:
Isn't that just a hack to work around deficits in sysvinit?
Matthias Urlichs:
The whole of sys5rc can be described as a hack to work around the
> fact that sys5init does not have a whole lot of features … if > somebody had evolved it with an inittab.d directory and a more > flexible file format, we might now have something that resembles > systemd's PID1.No. You wouldn't have ended up with systemd, or even something necessarily resembling it. You would have ended up with what you HAVE ended up with, which is a lot of designs and implementations, based upon a lot of differing engineering choices, some of which bear almost no resemblance to systemd (simpleinit, jinit, minit, cinit, finit, initng, runit's runit and runsvdir, nosh's system-manager and service-manager, ...). The idea of doing better than System V init and System V rc didn't suddenly appear in the late 2000s, after all. (-: