> It is impossible to give meaningful error messages for all errors. This problem was, however, largely non-existent back when most of the init code was shell

> It is impossible to give meaningful error messages for all errors. This problem was, however, largely non-existent back when most of the init code was shell code. It was easy to trace, easy to debug. (Edit: obviously, "easy" if you know sh and the idioms. They are, nonetheless, far easier than stracing stuff) It certainly had a lot of other problems (hence systemd's popularity) but debugging was definitely not one of them.