4 ms·

Thank you. Could you give summarize the main differences in approach between dinit and S6? I find S6 a stellar init system, so I'm interested.

• pzmarzly 3y ago
  The author has a high-level overview doc here: https://github.com/davmac314/dinit/blob/master/doc/COMPARISON https://github.com/davmac314/dinit/blob/master/doc/COMPARISO... Now, of course, with service management the devil is in the details, so before you use something as system-wide init, I find it useful to ask yourself: How do they restart services? Do they give up at some point? How do they notify administrators of failures? Do they detect crashloops? How configurable is the logger? What CLIs are there to debug the state of the system (which service was first to fail, where is its definition)? How to make ephemeral or parametrised services? How to add pre-start, post-start, pre-stop, post-stop hooks? Can you use environment variables in your commands, and where do they come from? I don't think you can find answers to some of these questions in docs. Once you do learn the answers, they may be disappointing - I indeed found myself quite disappointed in systemd after having to debug many failed-to-boot machines. With s6, I never run it, but there are few choices that raise eyebrows, e.g. the restart delay is hardcoded in source code to be 1 second. With dinit, I have yet to finish reading all its manpages, but at least timeout and restart policies are configurable.