"Ismael L. Donis Garcia" <[email protected]> asks on Fri, 17 Nov 2017 08:42:51
-0500:
>> But I understand that the new versions of openrc already bring the
>> possibility of functioning as an init system independently.
>>
>> In that case, openrc could not be used as an alternative init?
The TrueOS team, which provides bleeding-edge FreeBSD 12 on a ZFS
filesystem, with the Lumina desktop, has gone through a conversion of
startup scripts to openrc, so if openrc were to be considered for
Devuan use, there is already considerable experience, and I suspect
that the TrueOS folks would be willing to offer a retrospective on how
difficult the job was, why they decided to do it, and if they now
regret having spent the effort.
However, I would like to comment that I agree with the Devuan ideal of
avoiding systemd. I just pulled down the systemd_234.orig.tar.gz
source archive on a Debian 9.0 (unstable) system, unpacked it, and
counted C code lines like this:
% find . -name '*.[ch]' | xargs cat | wc -l
433922
There is also a single 81-line C++ source file in the tree, 20
*.py files with 20,128 lines of code, and 40 *.sh files with 2287
lines of code.
If I ignore programming languages, and just ask how big the text
corpus is,
% find . -type f | xargs cat |wc -l
833135
Thus, systemd represents a code base of about 455,000 to 833,000 lines
spread over 2201 files.
The main problem that systemd tries to solve is correct ordering of
startup script execution, a job that is done only at boot time. On
the workstation where I'm writing this message, the system has been up
for 491 days, so systemd hasn't been used much recently.
I checked several *BSD, GNU/Linux, and Solaris systems, and found that
the /etc/init.d or /etc/rc.d trees contain from 50 to 150 scripts,
with a total of 3000 to 6500 lines of code.
Conclusion: systemd is a pile-driving hammer attempting to smash a
mite.
This makes no sense: the original Unix philosophy was always to keep
things simple, and never to complexify them.
Sadly, systemd, and Apple's conversion of /etc/passwd into a binary
database whose corruption prevents all logins, are examples of the
failure of developers to understand the importance of simplicity.
Features do not matter, if the system is so complex that its
users cannot understand it, and its managers cannot fix it
when it breaks.
P.S. There is probably a good xkcd cartoon about complexification that
someone might know; if so, please post a link to it on this list for
our amusement.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 -
- University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: [email protected] -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233 [email protected] [email protected] -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
Dng mailing list
[email protected]
https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
