[gentoo-amd64] Re: Boycott Systemd

[Duncan]

Canek Peláez Valdés posted on Sun, 21 Sep 2014 17:28:48 -0500 as
excerpted:

> Or even simpler than that: If I wrote a daemon, with SysV I could not
> reliable write an script to starting it and stopping it in *all*
> distributions. With systemd that actually works.

IMO this the the big reason why upstreams are supporting systemd; it's a 
small, often trivial, file, with a lot of bang for the buck.  Ship any 
other initscript and you cover a single distro.  Ship a systemd unit file 
or two and you cover a half-dozen rather major unrelated distros and 
growing, along with most of their derivatives.  Sure it's an upstream 
reference file that individual distros can and reasonably often do 
modify, but it's a reference file virtually guaranteed to work as-is on 
nearly all those distributions, and you just can't get that elsewhere, 
full-stop.  


Meanwhile, for me as a gentoo user one of the biggest benefits of systemd 
is that once it's the general standard pretty much everywhere I won't 
have the problem of having to learn something different to maintain for 
instance my openwrt-based router, as it'll be the same general init-
system on my main systems and on my router.  My biggest problem with the 
router right now is that it's not using an init system I'm familiar with, 
and having once gone thru everything and understood how it worked well 
enough to be comfortable working with the configuration, and then having 
configured it, I promptly forgot all that stuff once I got it working and 
had no need to screw with it any longer.  Now it's seriously outdated, 
but I don't want to deal with updating it and having to go thru all that 
stuff to learn its special-purpose init setup once again, just to get it 
working and be able to forget about it again.

I'm *REALLY* looking forward to the day when it's all standardized on 
systemd and I can put the same systemd knowledge I use while maintaining 
my general systems to work when I update openrc as well, and other than 
the few unique unit-files, I'll "just understand it" and not have to 
worry about relearning all that every time I decide it's time to upgrade 
the router again.

Of course the same thing applies if I decide to make a job out of my 
currently and long-term hobby of Linux.  Gentoo's openrc is certainly 
rather niche knowledge and won't help me much with the statistically more 
likely chance that my potential employer has standardized on
centos/sle[ds]/ubuntu-server/debian/whatever.  But my gentoo systemd 
knowledge will "just transfer", being as useful on any of them once 
everybody's switched, as on gentoo.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman