[dijit]

Writing init scripts is as hard as you want it to be.

and 99% of sysadmins are not writing their own, they're modifying the ones supplied by distro maintainers.

If you're a distro maintainer then init scripts are something you write, something you understand because you're handling the state of your distribution from them.

Of course you can just abstract away all the code to another bash script and have your init as 2 lines (which is what openBSD actually does).

[Xylakant]

> and 99% of sysadmins are not writing their own, they're modifying the ones supplied by distro maintainers.

and even here, systemd makes things easier, more straightforward and comprehensible by allowing to modify system-provided units via drop ins. No need to copy, I get updates to the original units as I'm supposed in a clean and well-defined fashion.