Your average user & even most kernel developers don't even touch their init system. On NetBSD we've had this same argument and it's (always) under misapprehension. If any one is impacted it's the porters, & believe me they don''t want to supports n-amount init systems.
By
n-amount do you mean parallel startup or disparate init systems? The latter would not happen since there's one FreeBSD. At least one FBSD-based distribution (TrueOS) used
OpenRC IIRC, but TrueOS is history now.
Ibm/linux pushed this because there's hundreds of distributions that have disparate init systems that require greater work by distro developers and packagers; systemd init was born (and an ugly bastard it is!).
See above: I'm not promoting
systemd... In contrast, my concern is: it's reasonable to evalute
runit vs.
OpenRC as a replacement for the current
BSD init, like e.g.
is done here for Linux. Both allow for parallel services start, and they might be easier to manage for newbies (that's to be evaluated). Additionally, they supply service monitoring/supervision, which seems to be a demand of professional server plants.
It should easily be possible to switch off parallel startup, I you want that. Likewise, it should be possible to not monitor a service. Both are reported to be fairly slim & KISS. Thus, you'll loose
nothing, while others could benefit.
Contrarily, bsd has no such issue, thus rendering your argument moot.
It does not, because the current
BSD init does not have a feature that is demanded by many desktop users: parallel service startup. The only arguments against this so far were 1. added complexity, which I doubt; at least the added complexity will not be overly much IMHO; and 2. race conditions, i.o.w.: in most cases, it works well. There are race conditions in
any system beyond a certain complexity, e.g. currently my
wpa_supplicant(8) does not start automagically, but it does start w/o errors & warnings manually. If I want parallel startup, I would probably run into many issues right now. If it comes by default, I'd be happy.
Again: please stop complaining about
systemd and using it's deficencies as contra argument. We are 100% d'accord that this mess is broken by design. Come up with arguments against
runit (
sysutils/runit) and/or
OpenRC instead.