Comment by theamk
17 hours ago
It's not a lock-in as much as making a much better product.
For example, I never liked the idea of having my programs to manually daemonize, manage logs, set up permissions and all that boring, but security-critical stuff. And with systemd, I don't have to! Program reads from stdin/stdout, maybe gets socket from socket activation, and systemd does the rest.
Is it lock-in? Only because other system suck. Like, seriously, what stopped xinetd from having rudimentary volatile "on/off" control, so I could disable misbehaving service? Or why is start-stop-daemon so _stupid_, discarding all startup error messages? And don't get me started on all the different init file dialects for each system.
Maybe if the sysvinit programmers actually cared about providing nicer services to app developers, we would never end up with systemd.
The problem with the word "sysvinit" here is it's sort of a red herring. BSD init is better, in my opinion. I don't like managing all those symlinks. Plus, sysvinit is an old 90s application and its code does have some cruft built up over the years that could be removed and simplified. I'm devising a new init for my system that's much simpler than sysvinit and much closer to BSD.
"BSD init", "much simpler"... So does this mean you still expect applications to manage their own logs, daemonization and security setup themselves?
If yes, that's yet another init system not made for application writers.
Manage their own logs, daemonization, and security? The humanity! How will they ever manage all of that?
Come on man. It's been done for decades.
It doesn't take a giant bloated infrastructure to manage most people's needs, which are quite basic in most cases.
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