Mastodawn

Wow, seems like systemd is a quite a mess.

After an initial look at the codebase, it seems like since its a forever running process, everything was crammed into it from Laptop battery backlight brightness to absurd stuff like certificate validation?

Maybe I'm missing something but something odd about having so much unrelated functionality crammed into a single tool.

Need to look at breaking it into smaller tools that adhere to the Unix tools philosophy.

#opensource #linux #systemd

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Cy Mar 23

Or you could just use S6.

https://skarnet.org/software/s6/

s6 - skarnet's small supervision suite

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mahadevank Mar 23

@cy thanks! I'll check it out and see how much it can work with Debian

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Cy Mar 23

Oof, see, Systemd tangles itself up in other programs during compilation... they won't work without recompiling. That's why distros force systemd, because it's either required, or you can't use it at all. You might have better luck with a distribution that takes the second option, instead of trying to alter Debian and recompiling it all. Have you considered Devuan?

https://www.devuan.org/

I haven't tried it, but it's pretty close to Debian just without the systemd requirement baked in.

Welcome to devuan.org | Devuan GNU+Linux Free Operating System

Free GNU+Linux base OS. Devuan is a fork of Debian without systemd. Devuan provides a safe upgrade path from Debian, to ensure the right to Init Freedom and avoid entanglement.

Devuan GNU+Linux

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mahadevank

@cy yeah, i was reading about this. I run a very light system - i3wm etc. It seems that debian offers openrc as an alternative whiich could work but requires a fresh install to force apt to download packages that don't depend on systemd + some packages like docker will still need special attention.

Debian has an active interest in providing alternatives to systemd as an option, so that's a good sign.

I have a few thumb drives lying around, will give these options a shot