why do we use systemd?

[Sam Varshavchik]

David Benfell writes:

> Systemd needs to be a vast improvement to justify this. And it seems that  
> not everyone even agrees that it's an improvement at all.

Here's something that I can't figure out: with this entire thread in mind,  
why is all of this is being said /now/???

What happened?

I can understand reading stuff like this if systemd was new to Fedora 20.  
But it's not. It's been here for how many releases now? I forget  
(intentionally).

I remember when, as soon as systemd arrived at the debutante ball, it was  
painfully obvious to me what a horrible abomination it was. I distinctly  
recall bitching about it immediately, but my voice was just one of a few.

This flame war is, what, two years too late?

As soon as I saw that PID 1 is no longer only:

1) reaping orphan zombies, and

2) somehow recording, in some way, the current system run level, in some  
kind of a fashion, and, in response to an external command to change the run  
level, update the official scoreboard, and kick off some external process to  
have it take effect

As soon as I saw all sorts of things that PID 1 was going to be doing now,  
all the BS alarms started honking like crazy. Holyfrakingcrap, what in  
blazes is this monster doing, now? Who in their right mind would write  
init, PID 1, this way?

All the complaints I'm reading now – incomprehensible documentation,  
inaccessible and corruptible-by-design log files, confusing configuration –  
and all that jazz, all of these complaints can really be distilled down to  
one, fundamental problem: an utter lack of understanding of how things  
should work. What PID 1 should be doing, and what it should be doing. And  
how other parts of the system should work. All the other fallout flows from  
this root (pardon the pun) problem: not knowing what the frak you're doing,  
here.

sysinit's replacement could've certainly had functionality comparable to  
what systemd provides. But, four-plus decades of Unix, Posix, and Linux  
expererience mandates that a proper design for something like that would be  
completely different than the massive, monolithic state machine of a  
hairball that systemd turned out to be. systemd is exactly the opposite of  
how something like systemd should've been designed. You couldn't get these  
results more 180 degrees out of phase.

But all of this should've been obvious several years ago, not now. I just  
wish there was this hue and cry while there was still a chance to stop this  
disaster in its tracks.

Oh, well.

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