Not just SysV - every attempt to move beyond BSD-style init has been a mess.

> I wish there was something [lighter|simpler|more portable|more unix] than systemd.

I think the trick with systemd is to realise that it's not unix. But it's something else that's really interesting in its own right.

Init/scheduling is a much more difficult problem than it first appears, and it has always and everywhere been tacked on to its host OS as an afterthought: init scripts, cron, windows services, system v init. All are poor, partial solutions. Yuck.

To fill the void, there has been a proliferation of application containers, each of which does a different 70% of the general problem. All of this stuff could just be done in the platform. And that's what systemd is.

There's going to be two separate camps at the end of this: a group led by the BSD platforms will stick to convenitional unix goals. On the other side, the linux kernel plays second-fiddle to systemd. The systemd service graph is a new operating system tradition.

[New, but not without precedent: in the debian world, the 'apt' package management system has become more significant than the kernel. You can create things that are not linux, but which are still debian. Both systemd and apt use a sophisticated data-graph to contain a difficult problem.]

There are exciting opportunities for developers on a systemd operating system: you'll be able to quickly put together application stacks using microservices in a way that hasn't been practical until now. It /is/ unixy in the sense that it gives the console operator a powerful new general-purpose tool.

I keep coming back to that. It seems to me that there is a tension in the Linux world about people who want an open source UNIX and people who want an open source Windows. Systemd is much more a "Windows" approach to system configuration management than a "UNIX" approach.

That isn't "bad" per se but it makes for some confusing things. I would be ok if Linux became the open source windows flavored OS and Freebsd became the open source unix flavored OS. I believe such an explicit step would help folks move forward with "where" a certain idiom of OS management should land in the open source world. Of course I don't expect that to happen :-).

   I would be ok if Linux became the open source windows flavored OS and Freebsd became the open source unix flavored OS.

why doesn't anyone else view systemd as the direct assault on GNU that it is?

The answer will come quickly, I bet. it's how you figure out magic tricks, as well. :)

    > Systemd is much more a "Windows" approach to system
    > configuration management

There would be a comparison to Mac OSX, which has rounded the corners of init with its own approach.

It's also worth mentioning that all mainstream unix (even OpenBSD) deviates from unix philosophy in places. A trivial example - the way that /bin/ls changes behaviour depending on whether it's outputting to stdout or to pipe. If there's a gold standard, it's Plan 9. And almost nobody uses that.

theres some discussion here though: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/systemd-vs-launchd.44973/

(I'm just commenting to make sure people know that OSX's init system is not exactly without major criticism from people who know there stuff)

Seriously, it does not make any sense to say that systemd is a "Windows" approach.

How this isn't worse than Tivo-ization (the reason the GPLv3 was written!), now how RMS/Moglen aren't screaming about this, I'll never know.

Spawning processes and communicating over pipes is a UNIX tradition and also lets you sidestep the GPL. Should RMS be screaming about that too?

Maybe you can explain what a "derivative work" means to you, in relation to the GPL?

However, systemd goes way beyond that, and tries to control everything too much, in too granular detail. I wish the move from init -> systemd had been more gradual, there was no need to rewrite absolutely everything around init.

Application containers were born out of a variety of reasons, but primarily seem to be oriented around partitioning a host OS into individual resource namespaces each with its own library context. Thus, an attempt to address the fact that the host OS is deficient in providing a multi-tenant experience out of the box.

In fact, application container deployments frequently don't use an init and process supervisor at all, but when they do it's a bare minimum loop that reaps zombies and reexecs a process on SIGCHLD.

On the linux side, the kernel will start to play second fiddle to the systemd.

That much is true, for better or for worse. systemd and much of the new desktop userland is refactoring a lot of kernel components into userspace, creating the de facto equivalent of an unwieldy hybrid kernel. I suppose Tanenbaum did win that debate, after all. Sort of.

in the debian world, the package management system has become more significant than the kernel.

The package management infrastructure is basically what makes a Linux distribution a "distribution". It's the backbone. That you can create Debian stacks based on non-Linux kernels is because many Linux packages are cross-Unix.

as a development platform you'll be able to quickly put together application stacks using microserves in a way that hasn't been practical until now

Wikipedia defines microservices as:

   In computing, microservices is a software architecture
   style, in which complex applications are composed of
   small, independent processes communicating with each
   other using language-agnostic APIs. These services are
   small, highly decoupled and focus on doing a small task.

It seems like a daemontools-style toolkit approach (e.g. s6, nosh, perp, runit, etc.) fits the "microservices" umbrella far better. Indeed, I've been seeing plenty of container configurations based on those tools.

Given that multi-user and multi-tasking is pretty much a massive hack on what is at the core a single task, single user design, no surprises there.

I say a massive hack, as a CPU is in essence an assembly line. It takes data and processing directives in one end and spit processed data out the other. What multitasking does is basically to halt the assembly line mid job, documents its state, clear it out, and then load onto it the state of a different job. And so it goes, cycling through all the tasks.

Then again, the apparent reason for the discontinuation of Consolekit in favor of Logind was that the latter, via its ties to systemd-as-init-and-cgroup-manager-in-chief, was multi-seat.

A concept where one pretty much recreates the mainframe on the desktop by logically assigning disparate IO devices to a "seat", and so in essence creates terminals. Apparently this is supposed to work while still maintaining the ability to plug and unplug IO devices at will. Quite the rabbit hole.

Your best bets are probably s6 or nosh. If you want just a service framework without init, then you can look at OpenRC, too.

http://skarnet.org/software/s6/

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jonathan.deboynepollard/Softwar...

This because if a "service"/daemon fails to come up, you may as well scuttle the whole VM/container/appliance and spin up another in its place.

And having desktop and server diverge at a kernel/init level seems too much burden to maintain.