On Fri, Dec 16, 2022 at 10:46:12PM +0100, Andreas Radke wrote: > The older Arch developers may remember vaguely how Arch has introduced > [1] and migrated to systemd [2] becoming the new and only supported init > system. Back in these days we had some developers in our team being part > of upstream systemd developers. Not much discussion happened about > supporting any alternative init system. Other alternative init systems > have become niche in Arch and faded out over time.
Arch never had support for more than one init, and implementing this support would be a new feature. The BSD-style init stuff is still in a repository managed by Tom for those curious about this historical thing. https://github.com/teg/initscripts-arch > Nowadays systemd has become much more than a plain init system > and plans to grow further. This may leadd to problems from a user and > system administrator perspective once you are hit by some bug. Systemd > as a whole thing doesn't care about the Unix philosophy to do only one > thing but well. This is a faux argument. "unix philosophy" is a principle used for the core unix tooling and was never intended as a guiding principle in software development. How this is an argument against systemd is beyond me and mostly recycled garbage from the anti-systemd crowd. > Many and often highly skilled users left and leave Arch therefor or > choose some different distribution or an Arch fork because there's no > init choice in Arch Linux. Who are these people? > I suggest to fix this lack of init choice/alternative. I'd like to > implement it into the official Arch Linux repos allowing to choose > some different init replacement. We can either just add a 2nd init > system in the most simple way or allow real init-freedom[3] offering > full choice and leave it up to be further filled by the community. > > Arch Linux could take advantage of this bringing back some lost parts > of the community. With more choice and better portability Arch could > become a better base for porting to new architectures. And freedom and > alternatives is always good in the open source world. The clear > drawback would become some added complexity allowing to choose either > systemd or its replacement parts and to make all of them to work with > existing packages especially daemon services. > > I'm willing to do most of the packaging implementations when a majority > of the team think it's good idea and worth the effort. It's a rather > huge effort and imho not a task for some personal custom repo as it may > affect devtools, infrastructure and maybe more of our core distro. Whats the goal? Feature parity with the existing packages? Would we need to seek solutions to common problems solved by systemd which is not solved by other init systems? Would "choosing another init" imply that the systemd library shouldn't be installed on the system? The level of complexity and demands depends widely on how you would like to implement this support. And there is not enough information here to judge that accurately. > If you want to check how some init choice can be implemented I suggest > to start looking at Parabola[4], Hyperbola[5] and [6] Artix Linux forks > first. These are all rather small projects but we being the mother and > true Arch community should have the resources to implement it in a > proper way without any major drawbacks. Artix blindly copies their init-scripts from other distributions like Void, Gentoo and Alpine. They are not a reliable source of any information. (They have also started blindly copying over our package sources and remove attribute along with it which has left me with a very bad taste for the maintainers.) Hyperbola I have no opinions and Parabola has largely been nice people to work with. > PS: Please leave out all emotions about hating or loving systemd. I'm > trying to do so as well. It would help if you didn't recite poor arguments from a lot of the anti-systemd crowd though... tl;dr: Generally my opinion on this is lukewarm, the effort can't be worth it unless there is an explicit plan on what "init-freedom" actually entails and how you actually intend to support it. We can't even properly support multiple architectures, and I find it hard to believe we can support multiple inits. -- Morten Linderud PGP: 9C02FF419FECBE16
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