Comment by jeroenhd
1 day ago
I don't mind the inevitable death of System V. It's an archaic relic of the Linux era.
Going systemd-only is not necessarily a good choice (though I do understand it from a practical point of view). There are other, better alternatives for System V that are smaller and more modular so you still get the Unix "feel" without the absurd complexity of interlinked shell scripts that System V relies on.
I'd like to see OpenRC getting adopted in System V's place. Upstart seems to be dead (outside of ChromeOS) but it would also have sufficed. Alas, I'm not someone with the time or knowledge to maintain these tools for LFS, and unless someone else steps up to do all the hard work, we'll probably see LFS go systemd-only.
That said, there's no reason to go full-fat systemd, of course.
It's an archaic relic of the Unix era.
The reason it is being removed is precisely because now we are in the Linux era, no longer in the Unix era.
Have another vote in favour of OpenRC, and even Upstart, if it somehow revives.
I think systemd is the one to learn now if you want to learn Linux. Maybe someone can make a Unix from Scratch for people more interested in the Unix philosophy than Linux per se.
SysVInit on Linux isn’t true Unix though as the way it abuses runlevels to start daemons was never intended by the original designers of init.
Yeah, people forget the degree to which sysvinit was hated at the time - "why are you forcing me to deal with an impenetrable forest of symlinks rather than simply hand-edit a couple of basic rc scripts?!?".
If the intention is to create a system that users can reason about, then sysvinit offers the worst of all possible worlds.
systemd is most certainly the most pragmatic service to learn, but if you're doing LFS to "learn" how a Linux system gets brought up, something lower-level may be a better idea to pick up.
All this stuff is versioned anyway so if the point is learning youe can still read an old version of the book and use old versions of the repos.