Comment by yjftsjthsd-h

7 hours ago

> Especially because, as other comments have noted, systemd is (not) just an init system, and more often than not I have found that people who hate on it or try to compare it to any pure init system are usually both arguing in bad faith and fundamentally misunderstanding what systemd actually is.

... Yeah, except that system's excessive and ever expanding scope is one of its bigger problems. Are you sure they misunderstood anything?

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yjftsjthsd-h

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ethin  7 hours ago

Yes? Systemd is not an init system. To compare it to init systems is to make an apples-to-oranges comparison.

Systemd's "scope creep" is a stereotypical haters argument and is nonsensical. The 'Unix Philosophy' was a hardware requirement more than a philosophical one because back then they literally couldn't fit more than one program into memory at a time. And, regardless of the hardware or philosophical debate, systemd does actually meat this requirement: systemd itself is just the init part and service manager. systemd-logind is a completely separate service which you can opt not to build and systemd will work just fine. systemd-resolved, systemd-timesyncd, etc., are likewise completely indepeendent programs which just so happen to share the same codebase and are under the same umbrella. Are you next going to claim that coreutils has scope creep because all of the tools share the same codebase? Or busybox?

  • blueflow  3 hours ago

    He calls it "init system" himself. https://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html

    • ethin  39 minutes ago

      Okay, I think your conflating systemd, the project and package, and systemd, the init part, which is obviously also the dependency resolver. Yes, systemd is PID 1, and solely handles service init. But the systemd project and package contain numerous other components which are not strictly required, but compliment what systemd uses. I bet yo ucould probably build an LFS system with just systemd PID 1 if you wanted, although you'd lose a bunch of functionality. The fact that PID1 is systemd (the binary) doesn't change my overall point: systemd is not an init system.

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