Re: Please stop hating on sysvinit (was Re: do packages depend on lexical order or {daily,weekly,monthly} cron jobs?)

[Marc Haber <mh+debian-devel@zugschlus.de>]

On Sat, 10 Aug 2019 19:41:59 -0400, Sam Hartman <hartmans@debian.org>
wrote:
>I'm one of the people who has found systemd hugely valuable in server
>environments.

So am I, but I see a bunch of shortcomings.

>Things I've found valuable include:
>
>* Avoiding imperative languages for configuration

This makes using "magic" in startup procedures vastly harder. For
agenda reasons, Upstream doesnt want people to write scripts and makes
that intentionally hard. Because people usually don't follow, this
leads to bash -c constructs in the unit file. I have not see init
script that are on this level of ugliness.

>* Better restart semantics and monitoring of services/ways to configure
>  restart.

We have, however, failed to make use of that. "systemctl restart" is
nearly useless in Debian because a non-negligible part of our daemon
packages make systemd think the daemon is running while it is actually
not, and systemd does for some reason not to anything in this case.

I have watched myself involuntarily changing to a systemctl stop;
systemctl start scheme, because this has a way higher chance of doing
what I want. I haven't dug in deeply in this matter though.

>I'll admit that I do use complex dependencies more on desktop or
>appliance machines than I do on servers.

Would you want to share some examples of that, maybe on the wiki? The
vast amount of systemd documentation is weirdly short of example code.

Greetings
Marc
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