Re: However, I don't recall any major agreement that init needed fixing.
"Then why did Red Hat commit their resources, time and effort to developing and releasing systemd into the world at large?"
Marketing making engineering decisions would be my guess.
"Are you telling me they decided to change it up for the sake of it?"
Essentially, yes.
"Comments in this very thread show that init is not up to the job of firing up computers that *aren't* single-purpose servers."
Those are exceptions to the rule. In the 35 years since SysV init was released, I think I can count on on both hands the number of times I've had to actually code something that it couldn't handle. And those cases were extreme edge cases (SLAC, Sandia, NASA, USGS, etc.). And note that in none of those cases would systemd have been any help. In a couple of those cases, BSD worked where SysV didn't.
"And considering that every desktop distro I've looked at now comes with a daily FDA requirement of systemd, it would appear as though those building the distros don't agree with you either."
Do they actually not agree with me? Or is it more that they are blindly following Redhat's lead, simply because it's easier to base their distro on somebody else's work than it is to rollout their own?
"saying that the startup can be got to work with some script changes and a little bit of C code is a non-starter. "
Correct. For the vast majority of folks. But then, for the vast majority of folks a box-stock Slackware installation will work quite nicely. They are never going to even know that init exists, much less if it's SysV, BSD or systemd. They don't care, either. Nor should they. All they want to do is B0rk faces, twatter about, and etc. The very concept of PID1 is foreign to people like that. So why make this vast sweeping change THAT DOESN'T HELP THE VAST MAJORITY OF PEOPLE WHO HAVE IT INFLICTED UPON THEM? Especially when it adds complexity and makes the system less secure and less stable?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
