@davefischer

Strictly speaking that's a conflation of two distinct strands of history that were a decade and a half apart.

AT&T #Unix System 5 Release 3 had the system of subdirectories and scriptlets, developed because /etc/rc had exploded into a mess when people came to realize that sysops installed third party softwares. This was superseded by something else, the SAF, in S5R4 in 1988. Unices with AT&T heritage such as #Illumos and #Tribblix have that still today, all these decades later.

Whereas what people erroneously call "System V init" was an init+rc system developed independently, for a different operating system with a separate lineage, cloning the design of the old AT&T Unix S5R3 system of roughly a decade before, by Miguel van Smoorenburg in the early to middle 1990s. *That* is the strand of history that went from Minix on to Linux, and was in some flavours succeeded by Upstart and then by systemd.

#HistoryOfComputing #retrocomputing #Upstart #ServiceAccessFacility

@mcc @dalias @whitequark @becomethewaifu

It didn't replace van Smoorenberg init+rc. It replaced Upstart. The existence of Upstart is the part of history that many people forget or gloss over.

van Smoorenberg init+rc always was a straw man. The Debian committee included it, but everyone acknowledged at the time that the main contenders were systemd, Upstart, and OpenRC.

#systemd #Upstart

@CursedSilicon @gettie mostly because #systemD (and it's competitiors) took all the right lessions:

• Start less
• Start more in parallel
• Resolve dependencies to avoid waiting times

And basically everyone (#OpenRC, #Upstart, etc. Even #LaunchD [the #init for #macOS that is literally the SystemD but before SystemD and by Apple] and #SMF [#Sun's SystemD for #Solaris] did that to allow for boot times in secinds, not minutes…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo&t=12m17s

@BoydStephenSmithJr @dvandal @david_chisnall @strlcat

This reasoning is based upon a fallacious dichotomy. In the real history, Upstart existed and had a strong competing maintainership, to the level that the #Debian TC itself was nearly split down the middle on #RedHat/#Canonical lines, and the choice was *never* between van Smoorenburg init+rc and systemd.

It was between #Upstart and #systemd, the latter indeed being a reaction to the former, with #OpenRC as a late entrant.

@fabiscafe @okapi OFC @chesheer 's criticism is understandable on #FreeBSD given that #SystemD is inherenty focussed and intertwined with #Linux (just as it's Inspiration, #LaunchD, is intertwined with #macOS's Darwin/NeXTstep kernel).

• The problem is after some hefty "init wars" with like #Upstart and others SystemD became the de-facto standard, and the "(statistical) rounding errors" of #BSD users got sidelined, in part because BSDs looked at that mess and went like "Nyet, SysVinit is fine!" and continued their fiddling around...

And sadly there's nothing they (or anyone else) could've done unless they had multiplied suddenly and being able to keepcthe old tech stack maintainable.

• Similarly #Xorg is dying and there are already GPUs that only support #Wayland and #X11 apps get run using #XWayland.

OFC I wish for more diversity in solutions, but #Linux being #streamlined is what makes #portability across distros easier and boosted adoption as well as providing massive gains in solutions like #DXVK, #Proton and #Wine in general.

• And TBH most "#TechIlliterates" aka. "#Normies" frankly don't give a shit what OS they use. All it needs to do is serve them their eMails and allow them to 'consoom themselbes happy' as in watching YouTube, Play games, etc.

@cstross

I enjoyed how spot-on you accidentally were. (-:

Interestingly, people still argue today (as you've probably seen in these threads) as if it were van Smoorenburg rc that was the other choice for Debian et al. back in 2014; which was in reality either Upstart or OpenRC. It's a very persistent erroneous dichotomy.

#systemd #Upstart #OpenRC

@cstross

Right more than you know in one respect; but wrong in another.

#systemd came from #RedHat, not Microsoft; and the upstart was not Linux but a software package from #Canonical that was literally named "Upstart". (There's a whole backstory about the copyright licence that Canonical initially granted.)

Amusingly, Windows NT's Service Controller, its WININIT, and its Session Manager are three distinct things; not like systemd's architecture at all.

#Upstart