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The common argument that systemd makes init jobs unportable sounds quite funny to me. I've used a lot of *NIX systems and init.d jobs are anything but portable, unless you fill them with OS-specific hacks.

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The issue isn't that systemd makes init configurations unportable, it's that it makes programs unportable by tying them to systemd. What do we do 5 years down the line when we realise systemd was a bad idea and want to replace it with something else?

We have that something else, or maybe another component of the system implement the systemd notify api?

systemd has a vast number of APIs, especially inter-component ones, which are unstable and undocumented, meaning you'd have to replace the entire thing wholesale if you didn't want certain parts of it (especially its PID 0).

The thread we're on is talking about a public API that's not documented sufficiently for alternative implementations to be created without reading its source code.

Also you can, in principle, write a robust, automatic converter of systemd units into init scripts.

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