[nylug-talk] ubuntu looking to replace init

[Ron Guerin]

Michael B Allen wrote:
> On Fri, 8 Sep 2006 19:00:31 -0400
> Ruben Safir <ruben at mrbrklyn.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Fri, Sep 08, 2006 at 02:23:10PM -0700, Peter C. Norton wrote:
>>> On Fri, Sep 08, 2006 at 04:31:51PM -0400, Michael Werneke wrote:
>>>> Why is Ubuntu the only distro doing this?  What does Fedora use?
>>>>
>>> Because, excuse my french, fedora and redhat are lame. They're too
>>> busy trying to sell cookie-cutter installs and avoid fixing existing
>>> bugs for clients to do anything this useful in a reasonable
>>> timeframe. They mainly copy other people.
>>>
>>> That said, fedora is reported as being interesting.
>>>
>>
>> I don't have a lot of time to get into this, but as it is described, I'm not
>> a fan of replacing init with something 'reactive to events'.  I certainly don't
>> agree that making this core part of the OS more complex in its design
>> or behavior is necessarily a good thing.
> 
> I agree. As it is init / runlevels are too complex. If the replacement
> was 500 lines of code and very simple and elegant then I'm still not
> interested because I know what will happen. Everyone and their brother
> is going to put their design hat on and go round and round turning
> the whole thing into much more than what it was originally intended to
> replace. People will rationalize away any sanity and then it will fail
> because no one will want it.

The thrust of this is precisely that the present system is too complex
(under the hood), and that frankly, it no longer works.  This is why Sun
and Apple are doing away with it, and why we need to as well.  I've seen
people on this list mention at least one of the problems this is
designed to remedy.

You might want to read more about it straight from the horse's mouth,
where it also mentions Apple's launchd and describes differences.

http://www.netsplit.com/blog/work/canonical/upstart.htm

As for everyone and their brother screwing it up, if you read the top of
that blog, that's exactly the sort of thing that's not going to be
happening on this project.  If that was to be its fate, the author
wouldn't have bothered to begin with.

- Ron