As far as I can tell from the systemd blog and people's reactions here, the only advantages systemd offers are: - Splitting the configuration files, which increases the robustness of the configuration files - Daemon supervision - Bootup speedup by parallelizing the daemons. However, from the responses of some people, like Jorge Almeida, I see that the benefits of systemd are also given by other programs. - It has been suggested in a different thread to implement support for rc.conf to source other files - which would allow rc.conf to split cleanly - As Jorge Almeida suggested, daemontools [1], perp [2] and s6 [3] can supply daemon supervision *without* changing the init scheme - A patch [4] has been posted, and possibly added, to NetBSD's rcorder, which allows daemons to be started concurrently. As far as init systems go, it seems to me that while Arch touts using a BSD-style init, it's actually hacking around sysvinit to provide a BSD-like interface. This seems wrong to me, as BSD already provides a robust init framework. Why simulate that which you can use? In addition, people have cried out against several problems with systemd, which include: - ini-style configuration vs. shell-style configuration - Large, monolithic binary It seems to me that in addition to adding support for systemd could ease compatibility with other distro's, it would be beneficial to add sourcing to rc.conf (or alternatively to symlink the new systemd configuration files to files in rc.d). However, the only reason to do so is because systemd is widely used - i.e. I do not suggest doing this for every init system around. In addition, it may be considered to move from systemv to NetBSD's init, which stays in-line with the simple interface of rc.conf but adds parallelization and modularity. Lastly, it may be beneficial to suggest to users to install one of the daemon monitors. In sum, systemd offers some benefits that are covered by other programs and patches, while drawing much controversy and exacting a toll which seems a bit too large in the eyes of some users. For this reason, while we should add compatibility for systemd, we shouldn't force it down the users throats. Just my two cents. M [1] - http://cr.yp.to/daemontools.html [2] - http://b0llix.net/perp/ [3] - http://www.skarnet.org/software/s6/ [4] - http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=25822 (Concurrent execution of rc-scripts with rcorder(8) )
