Justin Moore writes:
And, not to be too flip, I think that's part of the problem.
Only the slow march of time will fix this problem.
The core features of systemd – the dependency-based replacement for init
that uses containers – the initial feature set that was was used as its
advocacy: it's a fair amount of code to implement, but it's not
insurmountable.
I think that if there's a functional replacement for that, there's a very
good chance that Debian will adopt it and use it by default. Once that's
done, all the Debian-based distributions then inherit it. Fedora and RHEL
will continue to be based on systemd, and all the Debian-based distros will
migrate to its replacement.
There will be some temporary pain without a local port 53 proxy; but it
should be possible to take a peek at how nscd monitors the changes to
/etc/resolv.conf (based on what its man page says) and mimic this in a
lightweight port 53 proxy. It should be possible to do that without actually
having to interpret DNS queries and response packets, and just forward them
to the current DNS server, back and forth. Thinking about this, I don't
think it's necessary to actually grok DNS packets to do systemd-resolved-
type proxying. But if it is, I do have my own DNS packet parsing code, that
has been quietly grinding away for …a very long time, which I can toss over
the wall pretty easily.
History is full of similar examples, of an established component getting
replaced by a lighter replacement: chrony supplanting ntp; cronie
supplanting vixie-cron. This certainly can happen again.