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Comment by xroche | Hacker News Reader

So quickly ? This non-issue has been pending for months now, mainly because of non-technical, ridiculous (ie. religious war with sysv) reasons, and we will at last go forward with it. Yes, it is far from being perfect (I personally never really liked systemd), but this is a huge step forward anyway. It's 2015 and we are still using crappy init shell scripts to start demons, and crappy text files to configure every piece of network. We need to move forward.

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Can you tell me exactly when text files have started being "crappy"?

"Crappy" in the sense that every piece of network has its own file format, which is parsed by different tools.

But the worst part is probably init scripts.

$ wc -l /etc/init.d/smartd 653 /etc/init.d/smartd

653 lines of code to start a demon, because of the differences between all distros.

Guys, seriously ?

It's actually because of, I'm sorry to put it so bluntly, distribution maintainer incompetence in the form of not modularizing common script functions, bolting on hacks like start-stop-daemon, startpar and insserv to achieve primitive asynchronicity and service dependencies, and to an extent the failings of sysvinit itself with providing little tools to contain the environment and enforcing messy symlink farms.

What you're doing is the equivalent of looking at some old Mach performance statistics and concluding that microkernels cannot possibly work... never mind there's one alongside every smartphone.

Around 1998 or so. They always were an incompatible mess of differing configuration formats, "standards" and kludges, but it was ok for the first 2-3 decades of UNIX...

It's 2015 and people are still making false dichotomies with sysvinit.

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