[agrover]

I think the fallacy is looking at the composability of tools on the command line and thinking you want/need the same composability in how the system runs. You don't. The Unix Way is actually TWO things: one is shellscripting and the composability of the command line, and the other is C and libraries. "Whipupitude vs manipulexity", to quote Larry Wall. Systemd is the result of determining that running system services is complex and needs to be handled by a real program instead of scripts. This is easier in C, but the flipside is the unavoidable loss of whipupitude. For most people this is fine. When Unix was young, whipping up something simple was fine. Now it isn't, and really hasn't been for quite a long time.

[anko]

Thank you, this is the most insightful comment I've read.

People like the whipupitude, because they know it. But nearly every init.d script I've read has bugs. There isn't a testing framework to ensure correctness and even if there were it would be needlessly complex because you'd spend a bunch of time mocking out the filesystem / the process table / whatever else init scripts do.

We know what initialising a process should look like and we should be stabilising this API so that we limit mistakes/bugs.