> It is opaque because I cannot read, modify or understand what it’s doing without breaking out gdb, heaven forbid I want to alter its behavior in a less than a

> It is opaque because I cannot read, modify or understand what it’s doing without breaking out gdb, heaven forbid I want to alter its behavior in a less than approved way. In this respect I think that systemd is really a victim of the Unix kernel/shell style, where 'kernel' is read expansively to mean 'everything in C' and 'shell' is read to mean '/bin/sh'. The problem is that where shell is easily examinable and understandable for most technical folks, compiled C simply isn't (yeah, yeah, we all know someone who can debug in assembler; that guy ain't me). It would have been nice to have had one system, with a typesafe compiled language. Scrutable, fast and safe. We have an example with emacs: one can always just M-. to a function's definition (even in the C core …). It's a real pity that systemd hadn't been written in Common Lisp or some similar language.