SoylentNews

Subsentient writes:

Hi, I'm Subsentient, the original author of the Epoch Init System. It's been around a while, and it does the job I gave it well enough for me, but Epoch has failed to reach its ultimate goal of becoming a viable alternative to systemd. This is for a few reasons, among them being a total lack of parallelism, difficulty for package maintainers to easily set up services, and a codebase even I myself am ashamed to admit I wrote. I got some things right too, like good documentation, powerful service management, lack of dependencies, and unintrusiveness, but it seems it wasn't quite enough, because the most commonly requested features were true dependency support and parallelism.

I'm doing a near-complete rewrite of Epoch, save for the few parts of code that were well-written, and it will be called Epoch-ng (next generation). While dependencies, parallelism and easy package manager support are the big things, I think I'd like to get feedback on what Linux users actually want from an init system, and I'll try to write an init system that does its best to meet everyone's desires.

So, what would you like to see in an init system? What would you like to NOT see? I'll be taking this feedback seriously. :^)

-Subsentient

Original Submission