[Brian_K_White]

I think it's fair to wonder, if the job is that varied, then was it ever the correct design approach in the first place to presume to ever be able to predict and handle the unpredictable infinite permutations?

This is init vs systemd. 50 years ago, they could not predict all the crazy infinite things a unix system would want to do. And yet they made a system that handled it all possible needs by knowing enough to avoid making assumptions about the infinite other end users or the infinite future. They knew the most important thing which was not to pretend to know the unknowable.

They made a simple base framework and a toolbox, and everyone was able to serve their own crazy individual needs, still 50 years later.

And it still works. Systemd did not need to come along to fix some deficiency, it just came along anyway because for every wise engineer there are 10 clever engineers, and after 50 years of rapid growth the population of linux admins is less than 1% people that know how to reject a shiny new bad idea and 99% kids who do not. Plus of course a few huge businesses who just want that kind of appliance system for their own business reasons and don't care one turd about engineering or empowering the end user or anything like that outside of their own walls.

It's at least fair to look at grub2 and wonder if it's not just a huge self-inflicted wound from trying to deny the undeniable.

Maybe it should be something more like a library of smaller scope scripts that the end user uses a bit more manually.

The common cases can still be handled automatically so no change for 99%, the uncommon but known cases the user can configure their system to use something from the library for that situation, and totally new unknown situations are simpler to handle by writing a new script or adapting an existing one, because the framework is fewer layers and less indirect.

[tuna74]

"And it still works. Systemd did not need to come along to fix some deficiency, it just came along anyway because for every wise engineer there are 10 clever engineers, and after 50 years of rapid growth the population of linux admins is less than 1% people that know how to reject a shiny new bad idea and 99% kids who do not. Plus of course a few huge businesses who just want that kind of appliance system for their own business reasons and don't care one turd about engineering or empowering the end user or anything like that outside of their own walls."

If you want to you can always run something like Devuan. You don't have to shit on other projects or people to run the software that you want.

[Brian_K_White]

Sure if I want, I can indeed run anything at all, including that. What's that got to do with anything?

The observation of majority linux and systemd and unix design principles remains a fact regardless what I happen to run. Even if the only thing I happen to run is freebsd which has no such problem. "you can run ..." is both true and irrelevant, doesn't change a thing.

Another thing I can do if I want to, is observe something and describe what I see, even if someone like you doesn't agree, and has no better way to handle that than to suggest the speaker should do something else besides speak their mind rather than actually argue or counter any of the points. (Everyone including me already knows the sales pitch for systemd, it's unlikely you have any argument that I don't already know, this is very much a religious issue at this point, as in there is no actual changing of anyone's minds on either side)

You like systemd and don't like hearing blasphemy criticizing it? Tough shit!