Comment by f1refly
3 months ago
Usually, it's the distributions problem to package software. You as a software developer publish documentation on how to build your application and then simply wait for other people to do the packaging for you. The creation of services is the same, you can maybe create a recommendation, but the service definition is part of the package file and thus not your problem.
In practice, though, the packagers quite liked systemd, because it a) makes service definition easier than any other system, and b) it significantly increases the likelihood that the developer has already written a suitable service file (and developers will like that that is used, because it reduces the chance that a packager makes a mistake and increases their support burden).
And as an end user of multiple distros, I really appreciate it because I also have to make services on occasion and it's nice that there's one way to do it and it's pretty easy to do correctly.
Usually, this is not good enough. I as a software developer often make use of the package manager built into the language of choice and use that to distribute my software. I also commonly make use of package managers of languages that I don't use to install software.
We are overdue to package manager interop and common interfaces.