[Nix-dev] Will there be a systemd replacement at any time inthe future?

Wout Mertens wout.mertens at gmail.com
Mon Sep 1 22:59:07 CEST 2014


As a sysadmin, I love systemd and journald. If you want to maintain lots of
disparate things and look all over the OS while troubleshooting, good for
you, but systemctl and journalctl make life so much easier. Upstart is a
very poor substitute.

Anyway, systemd is only available on Linux kernels (this will never change)
and that means that NixOS can't be ported to other kernels. Furthermore,
it's still not available out-of-the-box in Docker, so you can't install a
NixOS image in Docker.

It would indeed be nice if systemd were abstracted away, so that
supervisord or other inferior but cross-platform job controllers can be
used instead. Perhaps the "jobs" compatibility API should be extended to
support more systemd features and should be the preferred way to define
services, using services.systemd only when not possible otherwise?

Wout.



On Mon, Sep 1, 2014 at 11:32 AM, Michael Raskin <7c6f434c at mail.ru> wrote:

> >> This post (to this ML) says pretty much what I think about systemd and
> >> why I hate it:
> >>
> >>      http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.distributions.nixos/13967
> >
> >I take these things more as a joke. It is even more extreme than to say
> >that KDE or GNOME is eating all desktop apps. To me systemd seems more
> >like a collection of well-defined subprojects.
>
> SystemD explicitly refuses to have stable APIs between components.
>
> If you have to update all at once, these are not subprojects.
>
> >People often complain about not having an alternative, but I've never
> >seen anyone seriously put an effort into adding an alternative into
> >NixOS. It should be easier than in most distros, as we have
> >*declarative* configuration of jobs and other things.
>
> We do not have declarative configuration of jobs in any useful way.
>
> Our declarations are very much tied to systemd. Dependencies are
> expressed in systemd terms — the rewriting was very visible during
> the (not universally welcomed) migration from upstart.
>
>
>
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