2014-08-14

Regarding systemd

After reading this rant by Christopher Barry about systemd, I feel the need to weigh in myself about systemd

After learning more about systemd at the LinuxConUS last year in New Orleans, I took half a day to audit the source code. It's a nasty complex hairball, full of internal boundary violations, leaky abstractions, undocumented implied state, no DRY (don't repeat yourself), and poor code style.

It is, in short, a pile of shit, worse than most, and is not to be trusted, especially NOT as process id #1.

2 comments:

  1. If you could post some examples, that would be awesome. I know some engineers who would find this enlightening.

    Kind of sad, also, that GNOME is making systemd mandatory, which means a lot of user-facing Linux distros are going to be forced to use this at the very least.

    Why the hell they felt the need to improve on init is anyone's guess; I don't think faster boot times are worth the trade-off.

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  2. Gnome is not actually making systemd mandatory, only requiring a few APIs to be satisfied. The Gnome people are working with the BSD people to produce software that satisfies those APIs without systemd (which can only be installed on a Linux kernel).

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