[habitue]

Maybe a good way to get competition is to give someone a possibly dubious (but fun!) goal of writing a systemd compatible alternative in rust.

Reimplementing such a massive piece of infrastructure is pretty daunting. I don't think many people who are not being paid to would embark on it and then keep up the momentum to actually cover all those edge cases and maintain a community around it.

Rewriting things in rust seems to be pretty motivating though, so maybe it could be a force for good here

[milliams]

There's a willingness from the systemd devs to start incorporating Rust into it, possibly quite soon: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/19598

[dwattttt]

Ah, because while systemd is divisive, couldn't it be _more_ divisive?

[bmicraft]

This choice literally only affects contributors and packagers for distros. If you even notice it at all as a user, it should only be through a very slight reduction in crashes.

[habitue]

From 2021?

[notamy]

The original PR is from 2021, but there's been activity on it that's less than a month old indicating that it's still wanted, especially as the kernel starts to integrate Rust.

[nerdponx]

If you're just looking for init and service management, the S6 system (and its wrapper 66suite) are pretty good. It's the only alternative that seems to match Systemd for feeling like a modern tool in my opinion, rather than a relic of the old days.

[throwaway7356]

Don't want s6 as it brings with it a binary configuration database (Windows registry). systemd at least has text files for config.

[yencabulator]

Sorry, where's the binary configuration database in S6? The config looked like a collection of directories with scripts to run to start things.

EDIT: Ah, you might mean https://skarnet.org/software/s6-rc/s6-rc-compile.html -- that indeed is getting to be weirdly complex.

[egberts1]

My sole resistance to s6, binary config AND default-all privilege for spawned daemon.

Better to stick with INI v1.4 format.

https://cloanto.com/specs/ini/#escapesequences

[generalizations]

Been watching that for a couple years now. At one point there were plans to integrate with alpine Linux, but it wasn’t ready yet. Has there been progress towards that?

[awilfox]

Yes, there is some progress it seems: https://skarnet.com/projects/service-manager.html

[KillingSpark]

I'm Just going to plug myself here:

https://github.com/KillingSpark/rustysd

Rustysd is a reimplantation of the core features of the systemd service manager with a deliberate focus on less features so it can work on more platforms (e.g. BSD)

It's been a while since I actively progressed on the project but it works and would probably be a good starting point for anyone wanting to do further work in this direction.