[aiCeivi9]

> alternate init systems

Yeah, I am just end-user and I don't really care what is under the hood as long as it works, but isn't the biggest complaint against `systemd` is that it integrates a lot of other functions/subsystems that are not part of other init systems? And you kinda have to take whole package?

[the_why_of_y]

The only non-init part of the systemd that is required is systemd-journald; every other part can be disabled at build time via configure switch, or at runtime by disabling the corresponding unit files. Whether optional parts can be disabled on any particular distro is the distro packagers' responsibility.

[seriesf]

It does have a lot of features but my beef with it is how its integration into Debian still leaves all the misleading old cruft laying about. Take the MySQL server package. Suppose you want to change the limit of how much shared memory it can use. Well, the package comes with an init script, let’s put the ulimit statement in there. Restart. No effect. Ok, limits.conf. Restart. No effect. Ok, edit mysqld_safe script. Restart. No effect. Oh I figured it out, systemd ignores all these things and you have to set limits in its service file. But if you set it to ‘unlimited’ it silently ignores the statement. You have to say ‘infinity’ for some reason.

All this crud has just been left here to confuse users and I hate it.