Comment by pritambaral
7 years ago
1. Every distro that already uses systemd (which is close to 100%)
2. (Close to 100% of) packagers and maintainers of system services
3. System administrators using distros from #1 (which is, again, practically everyone)
Now talking seriously, even if IBM stopped funding the project, it wouldn't be such a disaster. First of all, it's open source. A new mantainer could take over the project (for free) so the distributions can keep using it. But even if a replacement had to be found, the process wouldn't be traumatic... just like when Debian, the base of many other distributions, adopted systemd some years ago.
A new maintainer could take over the project, but Red Hat was funding their labor, and the chances that someone takes over the project and continues contributing regularly goes up significantly if their labor is reliably funded. (Working for a large company is not the only way to fund labor, but it seems to be the most common one in our society.)
Similarly, having something worth switching to also depends on labor to develop such an alternative. Upstart is no longer funded, and was the closest (including in terms of mindshare that caused people to spend labor developing integration between their software and the init system).
That's right, but we've plenty of "plumbing" software for the Linux ecosystem whithout funding companies behind, and they get regular contributions.
The same should happen with the init system. Of course, it's different when the software pretends not just to be an init system but also a replacement for tons of other daemons like cron, inetd, networking, etc, making it a huge piece of software. But maybe that's the problem in the first place.
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systemd is interesting and innovative. But I do question whether the most baroque of the modern inits should be the de facto standard init.
The warnings for #1 were clear. Nobody wanted to hear or heed them. I have little sympathy for those that adopted it despite many people begging them (distro maintainers) not to.
I do not think that there were any clear warnings that you should avoid using systemd because it's good software that might stop being developed soon.
I also don't think avoiding using systemd solves the problem. My preferred alternative to an abandoned systemd is a well-developed systemd, not sysvinit.
Yeah, I'm also not a fan of systemd, but if there's something I dislike more, it's plain sysvinit. I _almost_ prefer the old BSD style "just a bunch of hand-rolled scripts," at least that one has you feeling special as you make a mess of it.
>because it's good software that might stop being developed soon.
Having looked at the code. Calling it good software is a dubious proposition at best.
As mentioned in another comment. There are other init replacements that are seeking to solve the same issues as systemd. I bet you can’t name them though since they were never properly evaluated.
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