Re: Be prepared for the fall of systemd

[Steve Litt <slitt@troubleshooters.com>]

On Wed, 2022-08-03 at 17:19 +0000, J.R. Hill wrote:
> There are a few things that need to be in place for a smooth transition.
> 
> For general trust in the project...
> 
> 1. the init system itself should be maintained by more than a single human.

This hasn't been the case with runit. It's so darn simple people *do* trust it, even
though it was written by one guy and he stepped away.

> 2. the maintainers should be willing to respond to a large audience. (If a project
> is used widely across distributions and is critical to operation and security,
> it'll attract attention from armies of newbies and large cloud corporations
> alike.) This means there needs to be an ability to move slow (maintain backwards
> compatibility) and also to move fast (in security situations)

True. All I can say is runit does one thing and does it well, appears to have no
known security flaws, has a small attack surface, so there's little call for
updates.

> 3. the project should be available from some trusted platform with versioning and
> source history.
> 
> For ease of transition...
> 
> 4. many init scripts need to exist, or they need to be trivial to write.

The originator of runit gives many example scripts, AND they are trivial to write.
See http://smarden.org/runit/runscripts.html .


> 
> I'll give some thoughts on runit:
> 
> I'll start by saying that I've used Void linux for a few years now, and I love
> using runit. It's simple, it works, and it's understandable. That's the opposite
> of my experience with systemd. I'm not passionately against systemd (or the
> developers, or RedHat, or even IBM), and I think systemd is technically impressive
> and ambitious. But also I don't really want to use it or anything like it.
> 
> > It's maintained by the Void Linux project...
> 
> Unfortunately I don't think this is true. It's used by Void, but we're packaging
> it by building from the source tarball like anyone else.

I guess what I meant was https://github.com/void-linux/runit . That's the source
code, maintained by the Void Linux project, and it's up to individual distros to
package it for their distro.

SteveT