> Only on BSD have I seen rc.d scripts that are not full of redundant boilerplate. ... SysV init had to go. As I mentioned, this has been discussed widely else

> Only on BSD have I seen rc.d scripts that are not full of redundant boilerplate. ... SysV init had to go. As I mentioned, this has been discussed widely elsewhere and I'm disinterested in engaging in rehash #1,020,102 of the same tired topic. But, to summarize: * If your service requires non-trivial work done as part of startup, reconfigure, or shutdown, you must use a script or other external program to get that work done as systemd's unit files will not provide the features required to help you. * Services that require complicated actions as part of startup, reconfigure, or shutdown will necessarily have complicated code to handle those actions. There is no way around this. * Only on systems that used both SysV init and SysV RC did you find that gobs and gobs of copypasta. Every distro I've seen over the past decade+ has factored out common functionality into libraries and kept copypasta in the distro-supplied init scripts to a bare minimum. [0] > ...I'm open to considering other systems... Check out OpenRC. The minimal service management script isn't much larger than the equivalent systemd unit file and is no more difficult for a complete newcomer to read. [0] Can you find egregious examples of copypasta and/or scripts that handle edge cases poorly? Sure. But you can find that stuff in any sufficiently large sample of code. Additionally, pushing the required startup scripting out from the distro maintainers to the maintainers of each individual project seems like it greatly increases the chance that a given wheel will be reinvented.