Comment by nineteen999

20 hours ago

It's funny I did an LFS system of my own a couple of years ago which I coined "Head Rat" Linux.

I used the SVR4 packaging system from heirloom-pkgtools (using this of a Claude port of V4 unix to x86_64 as well at the moment) for fun, and compiled up CDE on top of this to boot. I wanted to see what Linux would look like if you dressed it up as much like SVR4 as possible. I liked the result actually. It was kind of like what Sun might have done if they dumped their own kernel and switched to Linux instead.

Originally it used SysVinit, and I started working getting systemd to work with it (because after several years I've come to appreciate it) - but that's the point I stopped working on Headrat - I realised if I wasn't adding SVR4 stuff and was removing it instead, it wouldn't be SVR4 enough.

I don't know how I feel about it - after all I could do an LFS straight out of my head these days without referring to the LFS docs - but I do feel there is something lost when as a Linux community, we try to shove the baggage under the rug and pretend that things like SysV init didn't play a massive part in Linux's rise throughout the 90's and 00's.

History is important, even if we don't like the code today and have more capable tools. But I guess SysV init is deader than dead at this point.