I believe you are making assumptions about my beliefs that don't follow from what I said.
> I believe that systemd won out because they chose to embrace some complexity to solve really hard problems. Let's not pretend that a modern "init" does only system initialization by calling shell scripts and then disappearing.
I made a point to clarify I do not think SysV init scripts are a good solution for most systems Starting the services in a correct maximally parallel order is a constraint satisfaction problem, and many modern alternative init systems understand that. My personal favorite, dinit, explicitly uses the systemd model to great success, being faster than runit or OpenRC with less LoC. If someone finds that too opaque, they are free to use a more imperative init system without any obstacles.
> They chose to solve hard problems and people adopted it. It's not anything more sinister. It's definitely not an "un-auditable mess". It's written in well-formatted C with structure, good tooling, and an open community. You can disagree with the ideology but that's open source for you.
A piece of software being hard to understand doesn't imply it's because it's badly written. systemd is simply more complex as an "enterprise" piece of software. Think about it: RedHat's business is selling support contracts, so they won't risk losing a major contract by not implementing a feature their client needs, even if most won't use it. This both made it more robust and much wider in scope than other init systems, maintained mostly by hobbyist desktops.
For contrast, despite Canonical having killed Upstart in 2014, Google still feels confident enough in its security to deploy it across millions of ChromeOS devices, because it's a simple program that does one thing well, and thus no more risky than any other privileged binary.
> systemd was chosen by distros and users across different communities because it solves hard problems better than the others. We can debate about why that is, but the maintainers of Systemd aren't running smear campaigns against other open source projects. Often systemd is the subject of such ire.
I'm not ascribing any intent to systemd maintainers. But it's undeniable there exists a connection between GNOME, Freedesktop, and systemd, namely that each receive support from RedHat and share the most active RedHat contributors. When systemd releases a new feature, GNOME very soon integrates it, which FreeDesktop then uses as a justification for their new specification, which other desktops soon follow. This often lead us to fast-tracking adoption of genuinely good standards, but there is the confounding factor of funding to their general merit.
systemd isn't even a constraint solving system, it's highly "imperative", there's just memes floating around that think it is??? not even poettering would claim that
> I believe that systemd won out because they chose to embrace some complexity to solve really hard problems. Let's not pretend that a modern "init" does only system initialization by calling shell scripts and then disappearing.
I made a point to clarify I do not think SysV init scripts are a good solution for most systems Starting the services in a correct maximally parallel order is a constraint satisfaction problem, and many modern alternative init systems understand that. My personal favorite, dinit, explicitly uses the systemd model to great success, being faster than runit or OpenRC with less LoC. If someone finds that too opaque, they are free to use a more imperative init system without any obstacles.
> They chose to solve hard problems and people adopted it. It's not anything more sinister. It's definitely not an "un-auditable mess". It's written in well-formatted C with structure, good tooling, and an open community. You can disagree with the ideology but that's open source for you.
A piece of software being hard to understand doesn't imply it's because it's badly written. systemd is simply more complex as an "enterprise" piece of software. Think about it: RedHat's business is selling support contracts, so they won't risk losing a major contract by not implementing a feature their client needs, even if most won't use it. This both made it more robust and much wider in scope than other init systems, maintained mostly by hobbyist desktops.
For contrast, despite Canonical having killed Upstart in 2014, Google still feels confident enough in its security to deploy it across millions of ChromeOS devices, because it's a simple program that does one thing well, and thus no more risky than any other privileged binary.
> systemd was chosen by distros and users across different communities because it solves hard problems better than the others. We can debate about why that is, but the maintainers of Systemd aren't running smear campaigns against other open source projects. Often systemd is the subject of such ire.
I'm not ascribing any intent to systemd maintainers. But it's undeniable there exists a connection between GNOME, Freedesktop, and systemd, namely that each receive support from RedHat and share the most active RedHat contributors. When systemd releases a new feature, GNOME very soon integrates it, which FreeDesktop then uses as a justification for their new specification, which other desktops soon follow. This often lead us to fast-tracking adoption of genuinely good standards, but there is the confounding factor of funding to their general merit.