[Nix-dev] Will there be a systemd replacement at any time inthe future?

[Michael Raskin]

>As a sysadmin, I love systemd and journald. If you want to maintain lots of
>disparate things and look all over the OS while troubleshooting, good for
>you, but systemctl and journalctl make life so much easier. Upstart is a
>very poor substitute.

What are the keys for journalctl to make it work? Because it wants to
read hundreds of megabytes of data just for showing me last 20 lines of
some log — way worse than tail.

Also, could you submit a patch that makes systemd log stderr of services
reliably (stdout too)? We had it with Upstart, but with Systemd it got
lost and I am not sure how to make it automatic for all services.

>It would indeed be nice if systemd were abstracted away, so that
>supervisord or other inferior but cross-platform job controllers can be

And for damage control when SystemD starts to enforce FHS… 

>used instead. Perhaps the "jobs" compatibility API should be extended to
>support more systemd features and should be the preferred way to define
>services, using services.systemd only when not possible otherwise?

Or maybe, in a converse way, we could see what parts of SystemD-targeted
scripts sould be made reliably available (i.e. start scripts could be 
always defined as separate values, without ever generating complete 
units at once).

Upstart → SystemD migration showed that without proper second init, jobs
interface won't be actually portable, and maybe a refactoring that can 
be made even with SystemD-only tree could simplify initial addition of
partial support for other inits.