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A developer affiliated with boycottsystemd.org has announced and released a fork of systemd, sardonically named uselessd.
The gist of it:
uselessd (the useless daemon, or the daemon that uses less... depending on your viewpoint) is a project which aims to reduce systemd to a base initd, process supervisor and transactional dependency system, while minimizing intrusiveness and isolationism. Basically, it’s systemd with the superfluous stuff cut out, a (relatively) coherent idea of what it wants to be, support for non-glibc platforms and an approach that aims to minimize complicated design.
uselessd is still in its early stages and it is not recommended for regular use or system integration, but nonetheless, below is what we have thus far.
They then go on to tout being able to compile on libc implementations besides glibc, stripping out unnecessary daemons and unit classes, working without udev or the journal, replacing systemd-fsck with a service file, and early work on a FreeBSD port (though not yet running).
Responses from the wider Linux community are yet to be heard.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Sunday September 21 2014, @12:55PM
"as long as you don't edit a lot, of change anything,"
Its a script that starts and stops executables. For 99% of situations your only change should be the executable name.
If you're trying to embrace / extend / extinguish something by turning an init system into a complete social media web 2.0 hub, or into a retro pac man game, or a desktop environment, or a complete OS within an OS, you're doing something horribly wrong. Or rephrased, if your main complaint about an init system is its hard to turn it into something else, its not a very serious concern as long as its a good init system.
"isn't debuggable and barely anybody knows how it works"
Yes, nobody in the whole world, especially in ops, can debug or understand shell scripts, LOL.
"it's just not understandable why the system wasn't better designed in the first place"
This argument never gets any detailed explanation, because its wrong. Doesn't prevent it from being stated over and over. Sometimes I've seen circular arguments where "better designed" is assumed to be the mistakes systemd is making, with no explanation why those decisions are good, just that they are good. Of course many people disagree and they've pretty much got nothin.
"it's much better to corral all of the systems under a single method of working and make the system more programatical and logical."
That would be trivial and in fact a really good idea to abstract out into a library / subroutine. That has nothing to do with embrace / extend / extinguish everything else systemd does. There is a huge cultural problem where theres an utter fixation on running cruder less competent shells than bash because they're microscopically faster or microscopically more portable. So there's a huge push (at least in Debian and some other distros) away from bash and toward dash etc. This is of course a huge waste of time and is also controversial. Of course dash isn't all that much more advanced than dash, but its at least a little better. In summary, yeah, re-implement most of sysvinit in bash (or gasp, python?) with some decent modularization / libraries / functions / subroutines instead of cut n paste, and the whole world will be microscopically happier.