[fao_]

> I think there's nothing wrong with re-using good solutions that others have worked out instead of building your own just for the sake of being different.

But that's exactly what Red Hat has done in a lot of situations. The main example I can think of is systemd. It was built to solve problems that really only appear on enterprise production systems, sadly it got adopted across the board for systems outside of that niche. Essentially it's taken what was a working system (sysV init and friends are very, very simple to configure for 90% of the desktop configurations) and replaced it with something that somehow needs continual firefighting.

Back to the original point: Not only has systemd reinvented sysvinit, but at this point systemd has reinvented from scratch:

* The UEFI bootloader[0]

* syslog daemon[1]

* DNS[2]

* A Calendar / cron[3]

* A text editor[4]

* netcat/socat[5]

* nice(1) [6]

* sudo(1) [7]

[0]: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/76153ad45f09b6ae4546...

[1]: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd/tree/NEWS?id=2d1...

[2]: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd/tree/NEWS?id=2d...

[3]: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd/tree/NEWS?id=2d...

[4]: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd/tree/NEWS?id=2d...

[5]: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/76153ad45f09b6ae4546...

[6]: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/76153ad45f09b6ae4546...

[7]: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/76153ad45f09b6ae4546...

[JdeBP]

The claimed reinvention from scratch of a text editor, and the nice command, are in fact nothing of the sort. One is a means for invoking a text editor (of one's choice) against particular configuration files, no more a "reinvention from scratch" of a text editor than the vipw command is; and the other is one of the several settings specifying eventual service process state, and is no more a reinvention from scratch than the Service Access Facility's "ulimit" built-in was in 1988.

* https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19683-01/816-0214/6m6nf1of0/inde...

This is one of the standard parts of service management, and service management toolsets all have to do it, either employing nice or their own mechanisms. Gerrit Pape's toolset does it with the -n option to chpst, for example.

* http://smarden.org/runit/chpst.8.html

Ironically given the subject of Debian, one can look to the Debian package archive (or indeed the FreeBSD or NetBSD ports tree and some others) to see lots of actual reinventions of a text editor.

* https://packages.debian.org/stable/editors/

* http://www.guckes.net/vi/clones.php3

Similarly, the claim that cron is only just now being reinvented from scratch looks rather ill-informed given the existence of tools such as Uwe Ohse's uschedule and the multiple "cron" tools, many of which reinvent the design in significant ways (Bruce Guenter's split of scheduling, spooling, and updating into separate services being a notable example); and given the fact that Paul Vixie's "original" PD Cron was actually itself a from-scratch clone.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17808251

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17005677

[fao_]

> Ironically given the subject of Debian, one can look to the Debian package archive (or indeed the FreeBSD or NetBSD ports tree and some others) to see lots of actual reinventions of a text editor.

> Similarly, the claim that cron is only just now being reinvented from scratch looks rather ill-informed given the existence of tools such as Uwe Ohse's uschedule and the multiple "cron" tools, many of which reinvent the design in significant ways (Bruce Guenter's split of scheduling, spooling, and updating into separate services being a notable example); and given the fact that Paul Vixie's "original" PD Cron was actually itself a from-scratch clone.

My response to both of these are, can you point out any of them that are part of a monolithic system that replaces the traditional PID 0?

Or are you talking about people reinventing small parts of the general system? Yes. UNIX allows people to swap out software for other software. In the original use-cases though, the editor(1), cron(1), and nice(1) were at no point conjoined with the boot menu system, or PID 0.

Indeed, there is a fundamental choice between someone building a replacement for one small part of the general system, to make their life easier, and building a replacement for the entire init system.