Comment by donnachangstein

Comment by donnachangstein 9 days ago

11 replies

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Writing software specifically for the BSDs then licensing it LGPL is like trying to sell them chilled, bottled poison from a roadside stand. What were they thinking?

That said, this sounds like what systemd should have been: a service control manager and nothing more, before they got a thirst for power and wanted to control any and every thing about the system.

But one of those already exists, it's called launchd, as long as you don't mind XML vs Windows INI syntax.

WD-42 9 days ago

Because it’s a fork of systemd which is GPL. So, working as intended. Sorry Apple, you’ll have to keep using your own init system.

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  • renewedrebecca 9 days ago

    Something tells me Apple is not remotely interested in systemd.

    launchd, however works fine.

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    • Vilian 8 days ago

      Launchd was one of the inspirations for systemd anyway

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  • larusso 9 days ago

    What is a fork of systemd? launchd? My understanding was that systemd was inspired by launchd.

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    • flkenosad 9 days ago

      It probably was. But InitWave is a fork of systemd which means they have no choice but to use a copyleft license.

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      • larusso 8 days ago

        Ahhhh now the comment meaning clicked for me. I totally misunderstood it.

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wkat4242 7 days ago

Good, that will stop it from coming to BSD :) I really don't want it.

It's not systemd per se that I hate, I just really have an issue with Linux distros constantly changing stuff around to solve issues that I don't have. Another one is the move away from ifconfig. So I have to learn new stuff just for the sake of it.

This is the main reason I went for BSD, they have a more traditionalist outlook.

If they do come up with a new init system I expect it to be fully tailored to take advantage of BSD's own unique properties and not something tagging a long "because everyone else uses it". Especially not Linux because BSD is not Linux and we don't want it to be. Otherwise we would have used Linux in the first place.

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wpm 9 days ago

I'll take the well documented (man launchd.plist) XML property list (well, XML rendered, they're usually in binary) any day over some flat unstructured nonsense. I loathe INI syntax.

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  • squiggleblaz 9 days ago

    In case someone gets the misapprehension that there is a contrast between systemd and launchd in terms of the "well documented" attribution, systemd configuration is also well documented e.g. man systemd.timer etc. I didn't know if launchd has an equivalent of timers, but it does and I've just read `man launchd.plist` "StartCalendarInterval" and compared it with `man systemd.timer` "OnCalendar". I would have said they're about equal. Launchd is more concise, but systemd talks a lot about the interactions with other settings and edge cases.

    As for ini vs xml, I've generally found xml is a crueller syntax for humans than ini. At the time I started using systemd, it was a bit funny - the last time I'd been editing ini files was on Windows 3.11. But I think ini and toml are now once again reasonably common so I forgot about how out of place it felt at the time.

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