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0 pointsNursie4y ago0 comments

> 1. This can, and should, all be done without systemd, and not with idiosyncratic shell scripts and guesses.

What other system is there, right now, that can do this so well?

I'm definitely onboard with the issues around tight coupling, I'm really not a fan of binary logs etc. But the unit files are pretty awesome IMHO.

So serious question - what else does those as well or better?

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mananaysiempre4y ago

In addition to s6 itself, the author of s6 also wrote a survey <https://skarnet.org/software/s6/why.html> that provides a good large-scale view of the design space.

(My gripe with how systemd does a traditional init’s job is mostly the unit and dependency types, all of which AFAICT are specified in terms of actions on state transitions, not consistency conditions on states, so for all that it has a positive boatload of them I can’t actually figure out how to specify which configurations are permissible for my system.)

lanstin4y ago

I stopped reading when they started attacking bind. Sheer ignorance. Also cathedral is good for him and his elite team but not in general?

Unix has always been worse is better. You may disagree but it is the secret sauce. YAGNI for that potentially ideal system. Sadly. I like mathematically solid systems but the people with good enough systems explore the solution space much quicker.

mananaysiempre4y ago

I’m not sure what you are referring to. Do you mean some other page on that website? There’s a fair bit of design philosophy there, and I vaguely remember reading it and agreeing with some parts while disagreeing with others, but that was years ago. I’ve no interest in defending an arbitrarily chosen subset of the author’s views in this thread.

Indeed I don’t even necessarily agree with everything said on the page I linked to (which I did reread before posting the comment), but regardless of what I think about the particular point in design space (s6) it advocates, I still consider it a good overview of the space itself and prior art in general, and that’s the only thing I claimed to offer. I do have some thoughts about init systems, but I don’t feel they’re ready to put them up for discussion here, so I haven’t.

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cpach4y ago

s6 does it well

https://skarnet.org/software/s6/

NursieOP4y ago

Looks quite neat, though perhaps just a little more complex than systemd service files, I guess they essentially boil down to similar things.

Where systemd has one file with a bunch of settings in, this is split into a directory of single-purpose files in s6. I'd hesitate to call it "better", but from a surface reading it seems roughly equivalent from a usability perspective.

cpach4y ago

According to the author, Laurent Bercot, the code for s6 is much cleaner than the systemd code. For anyone curious I guess the best way to find out is to compare and make a judgment of one’s own.

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einpoklum4y ago

I'm not familiar with s6 myself. But - the choice between a single file or multiple files in a directory is a relatively minor issue in the overall scheme of things. i.e. if s6 is "better" or "worse", it's not because of this fact.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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mananaysiempre4y ago

In addition to s6 itself, the author of s6 also wrote a survey <https://skarnet.org/software/s6/why.html> that provides a good large-scale view of the design space.

lanstin4y ago

I stopped reading when they started attacking bind. Sheer ignorance. Also cathedral is good for him and his elite team but not in general?

mananaysiempre4y ago

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cpach4y ago

s6 does it well

https://skarnet.org/software/s6/

NursieOP4y ago

Looks quite neat, though perhaps just a little more complex than systemd service files, I guess they essentially boil down to similar things.

cpach4y ago

According to the author, Laurent Bercot, the code for s6 is much cleaner than the systemd code. For anyone curious I guess the best way to find out is to compare and make a judgment of one’s own.

3 more replies

einpoklum4y ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse