Debian To Replace SysVinit, Switch To Systemd Or Upstart

An anonymous reader writes "Debian has been one of the last holdouts using SysVinit over a modern init system, but now after much discussion amongst Debian developers, they are deciding whether to support systemd or Upstart as their default init system. The Debian technical committee has been asked to vote on which init system to use, which could swing in favor of using Upstart due to the Canonical bias present on the committee."

Comments

Re:Uh...

[Chemisor]

I fucking hate this new system. Its a mess of scripts that call on more scripts.

Actually, that's how sysv init works. To get a program started by systemd you have to create a service file full of magic commands and put it in the magic systemd directory. Then you have to type systemctl --abracadabra enable yourservicename.service. Then you have to go and add an [install] section to your service file, because nobody actually remembers that you have to write one or how to do it. Then you do the systemctl again. Then you check the log files to see if the thing actually started, because nothing gets output to the console during boot (except the filesystem mount messages and the big fat warning that my root fs is readonly).

Hoping for systemd

[devent]

I hope for systemd; I know it from Fedora. And in my opinion upstart is some kind of mess; it's a mixture of bash script and their own added syntax. It kind of feels like Microsoft's extensions for C++. I'm also a fan of declarative configuration like systemd is. After 5 minutes reading the manual of systemd I could write my own service for pdnsd.

[Unit]
Description=PDNSD
ConditionPathIsMountPoint=/mnt/read
After=NetworkManager.service

[Service]
Type=forking
ExecStart=/usr/local/sbin/pdnsd --daemon -p /var/run/pdnsd.pid
PIDFile=/var/run/pdnsd.pid

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

# systemctl status pdnsd
pdnsd.service - PDNSD
      Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/user/pdnsd.service)
      Active: active (running) since Mon 2013-10-28 18:46:23 CET; 1h 14min ago
    Process: 1585 ExecStart=/usr/local/sbin/pdnsd --daemon -p /var/run/pdnsd.pid (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
  Main PID: 1587 (pdnsd)
      CGroup: name=systemd:/system/pdnsd.service
                      1587 /usr/local/sbin/pdnsd --daemon -p /var/run/pdnsd.pid

Oct 28 18:46:23 vostrotitan.localdomain systemd[1]: Starting PDNSD...
Oct 28 18:46:23 vostrotitan.localdomain pdnsd[1587]: pdnsd-1.2.9a-par starting.
Oct 28 18:46:23 vostrotitan.localdomain systemd[1]: Started PDNSD.