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The lack of hackability is not fun. And some strange new programs won't make up for it. Bash might indeed be not the perfect thing for an init system but having no scripting capabilities at all forces systemd to implement everything hard-coded. What if that hard-coded Blob lacks a feature I require? What if that hard-coded blob contains errors? What if that hard-coded Blob contains security risks?

systemd opens a lot of doors for potential new Errors. I agree sysvinit sucks but worse is better in this case. Ideally an init system would be a lean and smart turing complete scripting language and every feature is implemented on top of it.



1) What's not hackable about C? 2) When was the last time you hacked on an init script?

> Ideally an init system would be a lean and smart turing complete scripting language and every feature is implemented on top of it.

You would probably really like NCD[1] as an init system. I was considering doing that in an embedded system I make until systemd came around.

1: http://code.google.com/p/badvpn/wiki/NCD


Hi, I'm the developer of NCD. I've experimented a little with using NCD as the init process, with some success. It's a very simple system now: http://code.google.com/p/ncdinit/ I think using NCD as init or otherwise makes a lot of sense in embedded systems, and with some work it could work for desktops and such too (consider adding services on the fly without reboot).


>1) What's not hackable about C?

Several tens of thousands of Lines of C code are a lot less hackable than a few lines of shellscript

>2)When was the last time you hacked on an init script?

A few months ago, writing an intelligent battery monitor for my notebook.

NCD looks great btw. but it is not an init system.


It's not intended to be an init system, but it would make a damn fine one.


I've got bash (erm, POSIX shell) interpreter on ALL my POSIX systems. I can guarantee you that.

C compiler? Not so much. Servers (security risk, more moving parts), embedded (space/power requirements).




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