@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 This was superseded by something else, the SAF, in S5R4 in 1988.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

@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.

@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

@alexmurray @stgraber it's not that we can't it's that we don't want to. CLAs are terrible and we've never required one for any of our projects.

In a way CLAs are one (of many) reasons why #upstart never stood a chance against #systemd. Or look at the #hashicorp debacle.