F21: why Fedora still has not alternative init?

[Gordon Messmer]

On 05/03/2015 05:04 AM, Frantisek Hanzlik wrote:
> - (bigger harm) Why hasn't Fedora alternative (upstart/openrc) init?
> ...
> When systemd presents itself as compatible with sysvinit, then IMO
> having alternative init in Fedora should not be too big problem.

Systemd is backward-compatible with SysV init scripts, but other init 
systems are not forward-compatible with systemd unit files.  If Fedora 
were to support an alternate init system, it would have to ship both 
SysV init scripts and unit files with all of its daemons. Then the 
developers would have to sort out how to be both a) backward compatible 
with SysV and b) ignore the SysV init scripts in favor of unit files 
when systemd is in use.  Bugs in daemons might show up under only its 
unit file or only its init script, which would increase the complexity 
of handling bug reports.  So, complexity is one of the reasons that 
there's not an alternative init system.

Another one is that systemd enables a handful of Linux features that 
other init systems don't (e.g. cgroups).  Any package that relies on the 
use of those features might be broken on another init system. Or it 
might simply behave in a way other than the documentation suggests, 
which would lead to bug reports that are associated with the lesser init 
systems.

> - (smaller harm) Why hasn't systemd option to run without journald?
> ...Why then in my system must run journald daemon, quite useless,
> occupying 2.5+ MB of memory?

I tend to think that's a better question.  2.5M of memory is trivial, 
but I have systems where the RSS of systemd-journald is 30M+  The very 
high variability of the memory size for that process makes me worry 
about memory leaks.