Why pro-systemd and anti-systemd people will never get along

It will be very interesting to see how this all plays out in the long run, though the short term is utterly depressing. My hunch is Lennart will be vindicated, on the basis that systemd as it exists right now is not right, but it can be evolved into something much better, and while that may not have occurred to other projects here the stakes are enormous. There is a definite strand to the resistance that any change to something so fundamental must be resisted.

The bigger side argument about the Unix philosophy is also intriguing. Rob Pike claimed it was dead and Perl delivered the eulogy, which I can half agree with. The problem is shell scripting is archaic nonsense, but our script languages can't do what you can do in shell scripts well enough. The idea of a Unix where you get rid of bash/csh/whatever and just run a lua/python/ruby prompt and have your apps implemented largely in that same language (with shell commands being replaced by functions) may make some people squirm, but would make a lot of sense for reducing the overall learning curve.

I think the point is that you can't have two competing init systems: the market will eventually need to standardize on one of them or risk forking the entire Linux ecosystem. What you call "modern sysv" would look a lot like systemd depending on your definition of modern. I think that definition of what modern should look like is what's being debated here.

The big features sysvinit are missing require user space applications to be able to interact with [generic launch system]. Those applications must use some sort of standard taxonomy and flow control. As applications are ported to [generic launch system], they cease working on sysvinit systems because sysv either doesn't support those features or supports them in a different manner.

Sysvinit doesn't really do all that much, to be honest. So it's really easy for [generic init system] to emulate most of its functionality. [generic init system] does a lot more, so it's harder to copy. Even more, if you were to "clone" [generic init system], applications make big assumptions as to how [generic init system] functions, so your [generic init system] replacement would need to function nearly identically to [generic init system].

Basically, someone made a call and said "this is how a modern init system should function". There is a vocal group of people who disagree with that definition. But no matter what the definition is, people would disagree because different people have different ideas about what Linux is/should be. You would see the same problem if a sysvinit derivative was the leading candidate instead of systemd.

Shell scripting isn't "archaic nonsense" at all, it's just that the warts from how most shells implement their command language (ksh/bash/POSIX sh) are holding us back. If you go look at Plan 9 rc shell scripts, you'll see how much cleaner they are. In addition, the s6 people have done some interesting things with execline (which looks kind of like Tcl), which works as a chain loader instead of holding the shell resident, has a simple parser and is performant: http://skarnet.org/software/execline/

The more I realize all the untapped potential lying around, the more I realize how so many Linux users are living in their monoculture. Unfortunately there is no one there to amplify all the good efforts and hidden gems scattered all over the place, so you have people just reading Phoronix and LWN articles and standing in their bubble. Meanwhile, all the non-Linux Unices and the "toy project" builders are doing great things, but everyone thinks they're irrelevant and dying.

One person decided the way microsoft windows handles services was awesome and it would be a good idea to make the linux service manager work like that with complex binaries and binary logs instead of editable, standardized bash scripts and text logs. No vote, only veto. Very anti-linux.

I don't want anything bad to happen to Lennart, I just want him to take his football and go home.

Then suddenly init.d will look very open and friendly again.

Maybe the same thing can happen to grub2 and I wouldn't mind going back to good old grub.conf