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Is missing SysV-init support a bug?



Russ Allbery:

But change sucks, and part of what accreted was decades of subtle workarounds to poorly-documented issues for which we have minimal institutional memory.

Like fulfilling the 1970s Unix promise of italics in manual pages, on the wide range of terminals that /can/ /do/ /italics/: stymied on Debian and only documented by a note at the bottom of a closed and forgotten bug report filed roughly a decade and a half ago against a long since superseded version. A couple of Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy quotations come to mind.

* https://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/italics-in-manuals.html

Russ Allbery:

And the actual position appears to be something around "we're building it as separate components because that's just good engineering, but we don't particularly care about use cases that involve picking and choosing specific components and are not really prioritizing them," which is essentially perfectly positioned to make no one happy and all discussions around modularity arrive at frustratingly inconclusive loose ends.

This is another thing that falls under the umbrella of the world changing since 2014, note. There have been discussions amongst the systemd developers about modularity, more recently. They've been tentative and limited in scope, haven't resulted in any concrete outcome yet, and haven't filtered through to the Debian/Ubuntu world, but they have been there.

Russ Allbery:

I mostly pipe up here occasionally to poke at evidence from the "systemd is horrible" side [...] there's a bunch of nonsense on the pro-systemd side too [...]

I don't think that I've pointed you to this already, but if not you definitely need to read this:

* http://uselessd.darknedgy.net./ProSystemdAntiSystemd/

The same person (whose name I don't know) later wrote these:

* http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/09/05/0/

* http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/10/11/0/


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