Hello folks,

I'm curious about 2 things with this poll:

1. Which do you think Slackware's init system more closely represents (SysV or BSD)?

2. Which do you prefer?

The answer to #1 is the first option in the poll, and the answer to #2 is the second option in the poll, hence the 4 options.

Having used BSDs in the past, I would have to say that Slackware's init system is much closer to BSD the classic BSD init than SysV.

I also indicated my preference as BSD, but I must confess it is not a strong preference. The BSD-like init system is easier to tinker with than the others. However, I don't really have strong feelings on the matter. As the init system generally works behind the scenes and is transparent to the user, I am comfortable with any init that works and allows me to configure it.

I do have objections to SystemD, but I willingly concede that they rest on philosophical, not functional grounds. In my experience, SystemD works.

And in my experience it doesn't work. Well, not all the time, anyway. When I was running Debian I lost count of the amount of times that systemd would fail to load the graphics drivers on boot and hang interminably, necessitating a hard reset. I say 'necessitating' because there was literally no other way round it: REISUB did nothing, which proves it was a systemd issue. This bug [yes, bug] was reported by a good friend of mine but it was closed as WONTFIX. Conversely, I have never, ever, had a SysV boot issue that wasn't my fault. If left alone it boots flawlessly every time. So my issues with systemd are both philosophical [as are yours] and functional.

I have no experience with BSD so I can't answer the OP's question or participate in the poll.

3 members found this post helpful.

Let's not derail this thread into another discussion about systemd, please. That's not what I asked for.

Understood, and apologies. If anything, I suppose I was expressing praise for SysV. BOT.

I don't know enough about the BSD Init System these days to cast a vote.

The last time I ran a pure-D BSD Init System was on SunOS some time before Y2K ...

If the BSD Init System still works the same way as it did in SunOS, then I would vote neither/neither, because Slackware's Init System is a hybrid, incorporating the best of both Systems ( SysV and BSD ).

-- kjh

This is one of those "my preferences are just the history of my experience" things - most of my commercial experience was in a Solaris shop that migrated to Red Hat due to the pricing changes that came about after Oracle acquired Sun. But, I was basically a user space developer, and had very little to do with any init system. But whenever I did have to involve myself with it, I naturally compared it to what I was used to which was Slackware - which always seemed much more understandable to me than the way the Solaris symlinks mapped things out. Big fan of "if there's no obvious benefit, simpler is better". Could be why I run Slackware.

Now, as far as polls are concerned, one thing that I did acquire was a preference for the Korn shell, which (opinion) is more capable than bash - but now that I'm retired, I've moved over to bash because the Linux ecosystem is owned by it.

This is why the question was:

and not

"Which do you think Slackware's init system is?"

===
I agree that the second question is, but the first question seems a tad bit more objective than the second.

It went something like this over here:

1. Was curious about this popular new thing I could learn, tested for few days on fedora but it turned out unstable and lame. (used centos 5 at the time)
2. Logs became unreadable on fedora, required special software to decrypt. I was not impressed by that. (used centos 6 at that time but not for long)
3. Race conditions appeared on both startup and shutdown. This is when I said forget it man, I have better things to do with my time & got rid of all fedora and centos.
4. Read in the news that DNS resolver was implemented and I thought it was a joke. At that point, it's seriously not getting on my drives unless it's over my dead body.

So.. regarding the poll.. prefer BSD type of init, UNIX-like. If or when the future kernels can't run that anymore, then openRC or another system base. Maybe netBSD.

Slackware defaults work fine here, and have worked for a long time, had no problems with neither rc.d or sysV.
Though ATM I can't seem to find any software except vmware which requires a sysV specific script and doesn't run with only rc.d script.
Guess BSD/BSD is the best description then, unless one decides to host vmware or something similar in which case sysV becomes a requirement.

1 members found this post helpful.

I voted the wrong category -- I chose BSD / SysV ,but, should of chose BSD / BSD... whoops ^_^;;

Noted.

There is not one "BSD", or one "BSD init". Which one should we be comparing against?

1 members found this post helpful.

Hmmm, personally I didn't know there were multiple BSD init styles.

I guess something like what the Wikipedia page describes for newer versions of {Net,Free}BSD (which, in my opinion, is similar to Slackware's organization of it).

Just voted for BSD / BSD and I agree with all the points form elcore's post #9.

bsd/bsd