> You will not have this without changing the kernel itself, /sbin/init needs to run as the root process of all other processes on the machine. By design, any implementation has to "take over the machine" in some sense.

Not in the systemd sense of putting its fingers into everything.

In fact, not at all. My init will be little more than Rich Felker's init; the difference is that you will be able to tell it to spawn a specific supervision system. (By default, of course, it will spawn mine.) So you could technically run my init and then run systemd as the supervision system under it. (Well, you could if systemd wouldn't complain about it, which I bet it would.) Or you could run s6 or daemontools or runit or whatever.

So your claim that any init has to "take over the machine" is not true; the real program running things is the supervision system, and with my init, people will be able to choose the one they want. If they choose mine, great. If not, whatever.

In other words, your claim that I cannot make an init that doesn't take over the machine is false.

> I don't understand why anyone says this, they are individual daemons in systemd.

They may be separate processes, but if something refuses to run without systemd as init, then it is part of systemd, and systemd has subsumed those daemons.

> If you are talking about just the init itself, there is no benefit to splitting that into individual daemons. The most complex part is the probably the code in between fork() and exec() that spawns services, this has to be done in all the same place, because this is the part that is actually going to be setting up the rest of the daemons. Also it is complex to write because it has to be async-signal-safe. Everything else is just configuration around that part.

Actually, you're wrong. As I implied above, init should be something close to Rich Felker's minimal init, and the supervision system should be separate.

That's not to say that they can't share code, but sharing code can be done through libraries, including the fork()/exec() dance.

Also, I've written an async-signal-safe fork()/exec() dance. It's not hard. It just requires reading the manpages.

> This is a really nonsense statement. He didn't limit anything or use politics, you can just not use his programs. It's incredibly easy to do that in fact. The "user choice" you have is the same as it always was, it's exactly what allows you to develop your own init or use Gentoo.

Yes, he did. He used politics to get distros, not users, to adopt systemd by fiat, the same way someone might use politics to get a state legislature to pass a law by fiat. Sure, you can move to a different state, and you can move to a different distro, which is what I had to do! That's not really a lot of choice. The more friction there is to change, the less "choice" there is because those for whom the friction is too much cannot have their choice.

What I am going to do instead is to present my init/supervision system and let users adopt it as they may. As users adopt it, distros might be willing to add it as an option.

> If you ask me, most of the drama (with both systemd and pulseaudio) was because of botched distro rollouts, not politics.

Botched distro rollouts happened because of politics. It's entirely possible for distros to support two init/supervision systems; look at Gentoo.
systemd removed a lot of user choice by introducing high friction to switch away by having distros change by fiat rather than over time. I'm sure systemd would have won eventually (without competitors) if distros had adopted it in parallel with sysvinit. People could have switched as they wanted and on their own terms, and they would be happy.

> I don't know what it is about engineers that makes them reluctant to promote their own work. I see this so often. If you work is good, please advertise and promote it. Please encourage people to use it.

First, I am going to promote something: my build system. Like I said, an init/supervision system is different.

Also, just because something is good doesn't mean that it should be promoted. They should only be promoted insofar as they solve problems that people have. [1] If I see an opportunity to promote Ur, that doesn't necessarily mean that I should. Perhaps the person I would evangelize to has no problems that Ur would solve better than their current init/supervision system. If that is the case, I would create problems for that person by wasting their time.

> Users deserve to have good solutions and they deserve to have those promoted far and wide if it can help a lot of people.

Users deserve good solutions, yes, but it is a better thing to make a judgment about whether Ur is a good solution for each individual I come across than to evangelize it blindly.

> Don't worry about the comments from the peanut gallery.

This whole thread started because I said I wasn't worried about comments from users, who you so disdainfully call "the peanut gallery."

> If you are confident that your work is good and useful, you can ignore the haters.

You're the one giving me "hate" right now.

> No, this isn't true. You could just make the init backwards compatible, which systemd actually is with sysvinit scripts.

It absolutely is true. We have the history of systemd to look at. Yes, systemd can run sysvinit scripts, but that's because sysvinit scripts are not run by systemd, they are run by the sysvinit interpreter.

> Actually, to prevent any amount of friction you can make yours backwards compatible with systemd.

systemd's declarative format is completely broken and hobbled. Its various types of dependencies are confusing. Implementation concerns are exposed to the user in various places.

No, I want a clean break from systemd, and I'm willing to have few users of Ur to have it.

By the way, you know my real name; I use it as a way to stop myself from participating in flame wars. However, I do not know who you are, an account created 2-3 days ago, just as these stories about Poettering started coming out. This is slightly suspicious, so could you tell me who you are to lay that to rest?

[1]: https://gavinhoward.com/2021/09/comments-on-cosmopolitan-and...