Lennart Poettering has posted a status update about systemd, an init/upstart alternative. systemd is able now to replace /etc/fstab and cron, and it seems it will be the default init system for Fedora 14. He has also written a post about systemd for administrators.
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Member since:2005-11-02
I did not misread it. Go back and read his original announcement for more details, but in the current one he brags about bringing down the number of processes used during boot ("PID now under 500"). When he says this he means "We didn't run shell scripts with lots of utilities" which means "we didn't run shell scripts" which he thinks is a good thing. In one place he says "We reimplemented almost all boot-up and shutdown scripts of the standard Fedora install in much smaller, simpler and faster C utilities, or in systemd itself" - this is part of his crusade against shell scripts as part of the init system.
Here's a fun quote from his "Rethinking PID 1" post:
You may not have a problem with it the way I do, but I am not imagining this, it is happening. I don't think Lennart's reasons are very sound, just like I don't think he was right to undermine jackd with PA when a great deal of their problem-set overlaps and could be combined.
It's good that someone is try to solve "whole problems" and not just tiny disconnected pieces (and I applaud that) but some of the choices being made are, in my opinion, just bad.
Member since:2005-07-06
Avoiding shell scripts is something a lot of the new init systems do and makes good sense but systemd fully supports sysvinit scripts including several distro extensions for compatibility and will continue to do so. It merely won't be the default. Although offtopic, I would note that jackd developer definitely does not agree with your idea of what overlaps and does not.
Member since:
2005-07-06
You misread it. If you supply init scripts, systemd will parse and honor it just fine. Systemd's native service files are not init script but very very simple (.desktop style) configuration files but if you somehow want additional flexibility that cannot be done with the service files, feel free to stick with your init scripts and systemd is very compatible with that.