On 10/11/2014 08:18 AM, Andrei POPESCU wrote:
Is systemd (the project) trying to do too much? Possibly. Would it be better if this was done in a modular design *done right*? Probably. Yet, none of the solutions so far has *really* caught on. daemontools, runit, s6, init-ng, etc. and even upstart were either never adopted on a large scale or eventually abandoned in favor of systemd.
They also probably did not have dependency bundling and an $11B corporation behind them either. :)
As far as I understand Linus Torvalds himself admits that a modular kernel design is better, yet he choose to make Linux monolithic. On the other hand Hurd is still not even in a releasable state.
I don't think there's any question that modular is harder. It requires actual engineering, not systemd-style hacking. Even Windows experimented with a "microkernel" in the Cutler days, but ultimately seems to have settled back into bloatware, the path of least resistance.
I also wonder if Linux has scaling issues, and how much corporate influence this causes and how much longer Linus can fend it off?
Could it be that a modular design for such complex tasks becomes too difficult to *do it right*?
I don't know, but I think given its history, the burden of proof is on monolithic, not modular design. A better question may be whether a distributed volunteer project can do real system architecture? (Where is CERN when you need them?)
Is systemd going to change the GNU/Linux ecosystem? Definitely. Will this change be good or bad? Only time will tell, but I'm quite sure that even if the change will turn out to be bad it will *not* destroy GNU/Linux, but help it evolve in better ways.
If nothing else it gives us a new low bar, a bogyman to replace Windows, which is seeing hard times, and now even resorts to copying Linux. :)
Kind regards, Andrei