Re: Distros specifically designed for children

On 5/30/25 10:46 PM, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Fri, 30 May 2025 09:40:57 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

My beef was mainly that it enforced the need for EVERY SINGLE DAEMON to
have its config file rewritten in a more complex form.

>
systemd had extensive backward compatibility with sysvinit scripts right
from the beginning. Otherwise nobody would have bothered with a transition
that would have been more painful than it needed to be.
>
This could be one of the reasons that systemd became so popular, because
it did a better job of sysvinit compatibility than some of the other
service-management alternatives.
>
And this in spite of the fact that systemd unit files are usually a model
of simplicity and clarity, compared to the usual boilerplate-ridden
sysvinit scripts.

 Heh, yeah but you can see exactly what the sysvinit scripts are
doing. I tried to write a Systemd service and ran into all the
weird commands and different edits you had to make. Different
sometimes from the tutorial I was following because things had
changed since it was written (and this wasn't that early - post
Debian switching to Systemd). That was all I needed to see, it's
obviously not for me.
 If you're rewriting every single daemon yourself then you probably
would get pretty good at it by the end. But if you're just
adding/debugging things once in a while like a normal person it's
a minefield compared to relatively self-descriptive (if you
understand shell scripting at least) init scripts.

   Systemd is not "perfect" - but neither was SysV.
   I see them as "complementary", not enemies.