Re: Is s6/s6-rc ready to be the ubiquitous init?

["Laurent Bercot" <ska-supervision@skarnet.org>]

>Months ago IBM bought Redhat, and IBM might not want to throw a million
>a year at a dev group devoted to keeping the systemd leaky boat afloat.
>Meanwhile, just today another major systemd snafu emerged.

I think you're deluded if you think systemd's going away by a
top-down decision. Corporate likes organizational stability, and
has a lot of inertia. They will keep what they have, they will
keep funding the systemd team, who are, after all, the experts on
systemd, and who will fix the issues (nevermind the fact that
they're also the ones creating them). They are not going to take
a major risk by throwing away their product and using something
they don't know.

Now, *if* someone with important lobbying power could demonstrate
to IBM/RedHat executives that they could do the same thing for
much less effort and much less PR trouble by supporting another
product with a much cheaper team, *then* they might be interested.
But we're not there yet, unless you have high-placed connections I
don't know about. :P


>If IBM bails on systemd, is s6/s6-rc ready to take its place? I mean we
>all know it's ready technically, and is well maintained, but is it ready
>politically, with help for distro packagers? Perhaps some documentation
>on best practices and making it easy to install s6/s6-rc.

I'm very thankful for your generous offer to provide documentation
and tutorials. Help for distro packagers is indeed something s6/s6-rc
needs. Can you give me an outline of your tutorial when it's ready?
I'll be happy to proofread it and make suggestions.


>We could soon have a rare opportunity for a Linux-wide init change. I'd
>hate to see systemd replaced by more snake oil.

  So would I. So would, I like to think, most people here. But
systemd isn't going to disappear on a corporate whim. It will have
to be dislodged with pitchforks and torches, and most importantly,
constant lowburn effort by enthusiasts spreading the word.

  The plan is coming along - slowly, *very* slowly because I have to
fund myself, but surely. Next year I'll be working on an interface
for the whole s6 stack that makes it easy for distributions and
administrators to replace systemd with something close to what they
know. Stay tuned.

--
  Laurent