[madhadron]

> A script which I can look at and see what it does. Like /etc/init.d/apache2. I do not want to execute some magic command like "service apache start" which I have to guess or look up and which gives me no clue about what it does.

Interesting. I feel the other way. Unix failed to provide a real service management system early on, so we have layers of historical cruft (Fork, close all descriptors, fork again, escape process group? Really?), and ended up with all kinds of absurdity in shell scripts to handle it.

The right way is to have a strong system contract on what constitutes a service, and have no wiggle room so that 'service apache start' does a fixed, known thing.

Sadly, systemd has to support all kinds of legacy hacks. A nice way to chart a way forward might be to define a simple contract and require someone to mark a unit file as "legacy" to enable the other possibilities.