Re: [gentoo-amd64] Boycott Systemd

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Sun, Sep 21, 2014 at 8:26 PM, Frank Peters <frank.peters@comcast.net> wrote:
>
> My system is booted and configured using my own custom scripts and
> I doubt that anyone would be interested in those.  They work very well
> for me and as a consequence I have no interest in contributing to
> alternatives that I'll never utilize.  (In fact, I would encourage
> everyone to develop his own set of boot/config routines.  It is
> not that difficult.)
>
> The concern is that one day this will no longer be possible due to
> the hegemony imposed by players such as those already mentioned.

I think you need to relax a bit if that is really your worry.

You can still run a.out executables, and there is no roadmap for ever
disabling that.  You can create device nodes using mknod, and I'd be
shocked if that ever went away.  Just what is it that you actually
need the kernel to do for you that you don't think will still be
around in 20 years?  Linus is VERY conservative about removing system
calls.

It isn't like the bits in sysvinit have an expiration date on them.

Sysvinit is only 2900 lines of code, and you could probably cut out
half of them without losing much.  I doubt it will ever stop working,
but even if it did fixing whatever breaks will probably be trivial.

If the whole world moves to systemd the biggest problem you'll have is
that you'll have to write your own service startup scripts, but from
the sound of things you're doing that anyway.  Most of the services
you probably run aren't linux-exclusive either, so while it seems
likely that many will start reporting their status to systemd it seems
unlikely that they will refuse to work without it.

--
Rich