On Fri, 01 Nov 2019 at 14:16:37 +0100, Ansgar wrote: > Possibly also tmpfiles, but without an init system nothing would start > the service and it would have to be invoked manually. Maintainer > scripts might use it though to setup directories in /var/lib or similar > locations.
Yes, that's roughly what I had in mind. Some container managers (I'm thinking particularly of Docker and bubblewrap here) already include a minimal process-reaper to act as pid 1 in the container, which is one side of what init traditionally does; it wouldn't seem like a huge leap for container managers to have some relatively minimal startup management (either running "hook" scripts during container setup, or implementing things like the tmpfiles.d spec themselves) to provide the other side of what init does. Arguably, things like Docker already have the most minimal possible service management: it runs the container's entry-point command, whether that's a web server, an interactive shell or even a full init system, then cleans up the rest of the container after that entry point exits. smcv