My god the comments in this thread are terrible. How can grown ass adults be so pathetically mean to a single person because he wrote (free & gratis!) software they don't like. Seriously, it's mystifying.
Here's documentation about the old SysVInit "system" of cobbled together hacks:
<a href="https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/SysVinit#Writing_rc.d_scripts" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/SysVinit#Writing_rc.d_scrip...</a>
Note the missing features, which I would call dealbreakers:
- How do I know if a daemon is running? What if you several "copies" of the same daemon, like multiple OpenVPN connections?
- How do you test if your cron script runs with the correct environment variables when it runs at 4AM? How can you test it with the same environment that will be set at 4AM, if you can only run it only on the interactive bash shell?
- Say you want to change an environment variable from a daemon shipped by your distro. Are you sure you included all " and ' on your arbitrary shell program pretending to be configuration? Can you lint your change or do you just pray, reboot and get an emergency shell?
- Freaking dependencies. Parallel startup? Making your webserver automatically wait for the NFS mounts? Make you sshd not wait for NFS mounts? Make sure your sshd starts even if NFS fails, so that you can actually reboot the machine remotely?<p>Here's how this can be done with SystemD, it's all supported and it works:
<a href="https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd#Writing_unit_files" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd#Writing_unit_files</a><p>I'm not talking about spherical cows, just basic server administration problems. Don't get me started on laptops...
Ugh, this thread! For years I pleaded with people to understand that there was value to being able to start up in a deterministic manner, but some shell scripts that don't actually work are supposed to be enough? Then someone finally solves the problem and it is written off as some kind of weird corporate control move. And people could still come up with some kind of alternative, but the open source movement that solved problems for people has been replaced by a hostile cargo cult.<p>At least I get to use systemd not just for reliable start up but also controlling the services that so many applications are made of nowadays. But it feels like some terrible Balkan conflict that just won't simmer down.
He can easily hop ship wherever he wants given the major impact he's landed in PulseAudio, Systemd and elsewhere. His design decisions have certainly been controversial but his impact is certainly agreed upon.
Maybe he'll go on to become an Executive Vice President at Microsoft.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop</a>
Does anyone know if Poettering has discovered NixOS yet? I'm reminded of it when I read some of his blog posts like this one [1]. It's hard to describe why, but I feel like he might be able to do a lot with what NixOS offers.<p>[1]: <a href="https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/stateless.html" rel="nofollow">https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/stateless.html</a>