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by null_content 2729 days ago
> Sure, but e.g. on Debian /etc/systemd/system/sshd.service is 22 lines. The still-carried shellscript version is 162 lines, and that's before counting any of the per-distro shellscript libraries systemd removed the need for. That's a big reduction in complexity even if systemd didn't have any advantages over shellscript init, which it does.

And for that "simplicity" all you need is a daemon that depends on dbus, glibc and cgroups (IIRC), just to name a few - which makes it non-portable for anything that isn't Linux and non-usable for anything that doesn't want to depend on, say, glibc.

And if they got their way, dbus would have been shoved into the kernel (kdbus, bus1, or whatever they called it) - adding a bloated mess of an IPC mechanism into the kernel.

Simplicity. Right.
2 comments
avar 2729 days ago
I think it's legitimate to complain about systemd not being portable, but it's odd to do so in terms of the non-portability not being "simple".

Imagine how much more complex systemd would be for even common things like "start this daemon and make sure neither it or any of its sub-processes collectively use more than 1GB of memory" would be if it had to run on z/OS, AIX, Solaris, OpenBSD, HP/UX, Windows, Mac OS X etc.

And let's be clear, systemd is perfectly usable for things that don't want to depend on glibc, for example it works just fine for starting Go programs, or your random C program you've linked to uClibc. What you can't do is not have a glibc on your system at all. Given how tiny glibc is in terms of modern hardware resources, if you can't have it on your system you probably weren't the target audience for systemd in the first place.

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makomk 2729 days ago
Worse still, some of the code in that daemon exists pretty much solely to replace functionality in that one shell script: the negated ConditionPathExists seems to be used only by sshd.service, with the non-negated version being used only to decide whether to launch getty. We've essentially replaced complexity in a shell script with complexity in an always-running process written in C.
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