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https://lwn.net/Articles/777595/
LWN (Linux Weekly News) provides a written account of Benno Rice's talk. The former FreeBSD core developer gives some context around systemd and what FreeBSD should learn from it. He compares the affair to a Greek tragedy which contains much suffering followed by catharsis. His attitude toward systemd is generally not negative, but I won't cherry-pick any specific sections; you'll have to actually read the article for once.
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the supervision of a licensed engineer.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @07:25PM
If geeks are supposed to be more meritocratic and fairer minded, the debate, and particularly the tone of it, over systemd calls that notion into question. I have not cared to personally undertake a deep investigation down to the level of reading the source, of systemd vs upstart vs runit vs sysV vs whatever. I have other technical interests I prefer to spend my limited time upon. So I have to rely upon others for analysis. It's irritating to be constantly trolled with what purports to be another somewhat analytic and unbiased piece about init systems and systemd in particular, only to find it's fluff and puff.
My own bad experience with systemd was when Arch Linux switched to it. The manner in which they did it was terrible. How much of that was the fault of systemd is hard to say. Anyway, to update Arch during that switch, I had to enter many complicated command line instructions one after another, over a period of a few months. I feared if it didn't let up, eventually a mistake, maybe mine, or maybe with the commands, would screw up the system. And that's exactly what happened some 6 weeks into the gradual switchover. Left me with an unbootable system, and the easiest way forward was a reinstall, which I did. Stuck with Arch when I reinstalled.
The crap Arch did was pretty bad. /var/log/syslog disappeared without notice. What they should have done was at least leave a text file at /var/log/syslog with a short explanation to redirect the administrator to the new journalctl command. Instead, I had to hunt around for an explanation of what had changed and what to do now to read the logs. Then, journalctl turned out to be a lot, lot slower, because they'd defaulted to a compressed binary log. Every time the admin needed to read the last few lines of the log, the setup imposed a long delay (5 seconds at least, even saw delays of 30 seconds) to decompress the whole log file, where before "tail /var/log/syslog" was practically instantaneous. I think Arch Linux has restored /var/log/syslog, but that was enough for me. I didn't stick around for it, I changed distros.
The Arch Linux people were also high handed and arrogant about the change, another factor in my decision to move on to a different distro. Basically told me to shut up, I didn't know what I was talking about, the decision had been made. Love it, or leave it. So I left. That attitude has infected most of the debates I've seen about systemd.