[dns-operations] DNS at FOSDEM 2016

[Matthew Pounsett]

> On Feb 3, 2016, at 16:33 , Robert Edmonds <edmonds at mycre.ws> wrote:
> 
>> This is my feeling exactly.  Concerns I’ve heard about stability and transparency (and therefore ease of troubleshooting) aside, systemd is just reaching into too many parts of the OS.  I’m highly supportive of the idea of writing a new validating stub .. but I think it’s folly to link it into the boot/cron system.  Same feeling I have with systemd’s integration into /tmp clearing, and a host of other things it shouldn’t be doing directly, or possibly at all.
> 
> Other than being part of the same umbrella project, being developed by
> the same people, and sharing some utility code (config file parsing,
> abstract data type implementations, etc.), I'm not sure if it's accurate
> to say that it's linked to the boot/cron system, at least not in the
> runtime sense.  It certainly doesn't run inside the PID 1 systemd
> process.
> 
> Is the situation really that different from, say, 4.x BSD?  Your init
> system, startup scripts, cron daemon, etc. and DNS stub resolver all
> came from the same vendor and were integrated into the base OS ;-)

My init system and the things it starts up are not interdependent.  As an init replacement, systemd reaches way too far into the system.  There are good arguments for updating the way Linux and BSD both do startup, but they could have (and probably should have) done something smart like clone Apple’s launchd and stop there.  If they also think there are issues with the way some other subsystems work, then fine.. start up a project to work on replacements for those.  Linking them into the init system makes the whole thing one big fragile mess.

This is getting a bit off topic though, so I’ll leave it at that.