On Sun, Oct 19, 2014 at 03:09:15PM +0200, Eelco Dolstra wrote: > Hi, > > On 19/10/14 13:30, Nathan Bijnens wrote: > > > It's not all quiet at other Distro's, some Debian developers are considering > > forking Debian if Debian switches to SystemD: http://debianfork.org/ > > > > I like some of the features of SystemD; on the other hand it makes porting > > Nix > > very hard to Non-linux. > > To be clear: Nix has no dependency whatsoever on systemd. NixOS obviously > does, > but since it's a Linux distribution, it doesn't have to be portable to > non-Linux > systems. > > > I think it makes sense to have a abstraction in Nix for defining services > > and > > timers; by default it uses SystemD, but it shouldn't be to hard to have > > other > > implementations (like plain cron, ...). This would make Nix(OS) as future > > proof > > as possible. > > Defining services in an abstract way sounds nice. NixOS had a "jobs" option > that > was intended to do just that. Unfortunately, it's not really achievable > because > the semantics of the init system always leak through (e.g. Upstart's > dependency > model is totally different from systemd's). Worse, you would have to restrict > yourself to the lowest common denominator of all init systems. So no socket > activation, startup notification (like sd_notify), automatic cleanup of > dangling > processes via cgroups, and so on. >
Actually, with programmatic configuration like NixOS you simply don't *need* all of these fancy features in the init system. Instead each service can take care of these things itself. See our (currently experimental and very much under development) deployment specification defnixos [1]. FWIW, I agree with Michael Raskin that both sides are being hyperbolic here. I've had some real frustrations caused by systemd's integration of everything, but in many ways it's also been a great improvement over what we had before. I think there is nothing I'd consider 'great' in the sphere of general-purpose init daemons, and systemd may very well be the best for personal machines, but ultimately I'm not convinced general-purpose is the right way to go for something like NixOS. ~Shea [1]: https://github.com/zalora/defnix/tree/master/defnixos > > -- > Eelco Dolstra | LogicBlox, Inc. | http://nixos.org/~eelco/ > _______________________________________________ > nix-dev mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev _______________________________________________ nix-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
