[Nix-dev] Is systemd a benefit or a liability?

[Eelco Dolstra]

Hi,

On 19/10/14 11:48, Peter Simons wrote:

> the article at [1] discusses pros and cons of systemd and raises some
> interesting points, IMHO. The most important one is that by assimilating
> all kinds of standard Unix services like cron, ntpd, and syslogd into a
> monolithic program, systemd prevents innovation because it's nearly
> impossible to replace any one of those services with an alternative one.

This is simply not true. Cron, ntpd, syslogd etc. all work fine on systemd. In
fact, NixOS currently does not use any of the systemd-networkd stuff. Just
because systemd ships with an NTP client (which you can disable both at build
time and at runtime), does not prevent you from using another.

> If you have systemd installed, then half of your Unix ecosystem is
> locked into one particular implementation of services that used to be
> diverse, modular, and replaceable.

They are still modular and replaceable (except for "core" stuff like udevd).

-- 
Eelco Dolstra | LogicBlox, Inc. | http://nixos.org/~eelco/