Comment by dijit
3 months ago
When comparing systemd to things, I find it more fruitful to compare it to something like SMF, which actually does the things people wanted systemd to do:
* socket activation
* dependency management of startup
* log control
* service supervision.
Except, it did so by interfacing with the operating system in its native language, for example: log files were text.
It is not useful to complain about bash scripts, the original design of init was indeed dated and you’d be hard pressed to find people who don’t think so; so its an invalid point to make in this discussion.
If SMF was any good we'd be actually using it instead of systemd.
We don’t use SMF for the same reasons we didn’t have ZFS on linux for so long, worries about the CDDL license and how it integrates.
I’m also not saying we should have ported SMF, one complaint I have about it is that it was a product of its time and used XML (much like launchd on macos, which is actually another supervising init btw ;D).
However taking inspiration would have been good, instead of creating software that appears like it belongs on a Windows/DOS based operating system rather than a unix-like.