[vox-tech] Systemd thoughts?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Nick Schmalenberger (nick at schmalenberger.us):

> Wow man, nice job hijacking a thread to spout close minded
> insults about an upcoming talk that is explicitly meant to show
> why its not as bad as people say it is.

Yes, Mark, that was a little uncool.  Entirely new threads are best
_not_ started as replies to existing ones.  It's better for a new thread
to be, y'know, new.

Eschewing the systemd init[1] on distros where it's become default is 
a very minor technical problem that is pretty easily solved.  E.g., I 
apt-get upgraded a test system to Debian 8.0 Jessie (current Testing 
branch, soon to be Stable), and was able to revert the silent changover
to systemd, and prevent its future return, like this:

# apt-get install sysvinit-core sysvinit sysvinit-utils
# apt-get remove --purge --auto-remove systemd
# echo -e 'Package: systemd\nPin: origin ""\nPin-Priority: -1' >  /etc/apt/preferences.d/systemd

I'm actually looking forward to testing OpenRC[2] on this test system, a
well-made event-driven init utterly without the scope-creep drawbacks
that created notorious flamewars several years ago, and that some LUGs
are only belatedly noticing.

Other distros such as Fedora and OpenSUSE that no longer provide any
other properly packaged inits will be a problem, but there are plenty of
alternative distro choices.

> Personally, I'm really looking forward to hearing this talk and I
> don't usually make it to LUGOD more than once a year.

I respect Alison Chaiken immensely, and was of course pleased to invite
her to give this talk at SVLUG, and would not have dreamed of speaking
up to challenge any part of it, given that I was the meeting host.
Listen carefully for the numerous highly doubtful points, like the bit
where she does a comparison based on number of lines of code of a binary.


[1] It should not be forgotten that systemd is much more than just an
init, providing a large suite covering many functions.

[2] https://lwn.net/Articles/512719/