[systemd-devel] self domuneting and customizable

[Wouter De Borger]

Hi all,

I'm just learning to know systemd and it seems very nice, but I have
one question/consideration.

System V init scripts are self documenting and customizable: they are
scripts. It is easy to read and edit them. One can read through the
init process from step one and learn to know every step of the process
and tweak when required.

While systemd is much more powerful, the native parts are not easy to
understand or adapt. They are more like magic. When reading the
scripts, they aren't there. When they fail (let's say due to a non
standard implementation of the mount command) they can't be patched
on-the-fly.

What do the developers think of the trade-off between speed (native)
and robustness/customisability/self documentation (scripted).

More explanation:

1- personal experience: when starting to work with openwrt, init
scripts didn't work properly, to debug the issue, I read through the
init procedure and placed some echo statements in the init scripts,
until I found the bug. With systemd this would not work.
2- I'm a software engineering PhD student. From this perspective I
like the parrallellisation, lazy loading and event support very much.
At the other hand, I also strongly believe in language oriented
programming. If even gnome introduces a scripting language to make the
shell more customizable, I find it surprising that the init system
moves scripting languages out. I can see that speed is an issue here,
but I wonder how you balance that against ease of use? Would it not be
better to make the scripts faster? (Replace the shells by a
interpreted language?)


Thanks in advance,
Wouter