Misleading in that Ubuntu and Fedora did use Upstart but not in its native mode, they used it in its sysvinit compatibility mode. This is almost identical to sysvinit, so from the point of view of a user or a package maintainer it was functionally barely distinguishable from sysvinit.
OpenRC was considered by Debian, but 7 out of 8 members of the technical committee preferred both systemd and Upstart to OpenRC (Ian Jackson preferred sysvinit over OpenRC and "further discussion" over every other option).
There was also uselessd, which was the systemd init system without the rest. https://bitbucket.org/Tarnyko/uselessd/src/linux-devel/ It was a joke, but nonetheless if you like systemd's init system them you are probably going to like uselessd, because that's what it is - systemd's init system without the rest.
At 82k loc it's huge for what it does, but nonetheless is order(s?) of magnitude smaller than systemd. If it was active I'd trust it more that systemd on that basis alone.
I can't say I'm a fan of systemd's event driven approach. A system whose state depends on it's configuration plus past state is usually a nightmare to debug and control compared to a system who state is dependent on it's configuration alone - and that's how it has worked out for me and systemd.
The simple cases work fine of course but systemd's power over what came before it is it's dependency relationships it allows you setup. But they are the very things that break in weird and wonderful ways when the events it's reacting to fire in an unexpected order. If you could set them up reliably without much thinking it would be a big win - but as it is, not so much.
> Incorrect in that openSUSE and Arch are major distros and migrated from sysvinit to systemd.
OpenSUSE also had upstart in the meanwhile but continued to support sysvinit as an alternative.
Arch Linux had sysvinit as it's pid1, but it's big sell initially was that, similar to Crux, it had a custom BSD-style init script setup and did not use sysvinit's booting and rc mechanism.
OpenRC systems typically also continue to use sysvinit's pid1 to this day, which is not the complaint people have with it but the impossible to understand script sand lack of dependency management of it's service management because it was never meant to do service management which was a bit of a hack.
> Misleading in that Ubuntu and Fedora did use Upstart but not in its native mode, they used it in its sysvinit compatibility mode. This is almost identical to sysvinit, so from the point of view of a user or a package maintainer it was functionally barely distinguishable from sysvinit.
There is no such compatibility mode as far as I know. A big sell of Upstart and OpenRC was always that it was backwards compatible with old-style sysvinit-style scripts even though new ones were written in the new style. There is no global mode as far as I know but no doubt many of the olds scripts remained.
> OpenRC was considered by Debian, but 7 out of 8 members of the technical committee preferred both systemd and Upstart to OpenRC (Ian Jackson preferred sysvinit over OpenRC and "further discussion" over every other option).
That would not surprise me. It's not what Debian is looking for.
openSUSE 12.1 defaults to systemd (see previous comment), with sysvinit as non-default option.
So Upstart was a short-lived non-default option.
> A big sell of Upstart and OpenRC was always that it was backwards compatible with old-style sysvinit-style scripts even though new ones were written in the new style.
You are right that there are no distinct modes as such, my memory is quite fuzzy as it's been some years, and I wouldn't rely on anything I say. And it looks like Ubuntu (unlike Fedora) did replace a lot of init.d scripts with native Upstart jobs.
I can't remember what the problem was with mixing init.d scripts and native Upstart jobs, or what impact it had, maybe it was not important in practice.
The Debian wiki has this item, but, well, it's a Wiki, so perhaps it's not the most reliable source.
Can't set proper dependencies until everything has converted from SysV init files to Upstart jobs.
This is partially incorrect and partially misleading.
Incorrect in that openSUSE and Arch are major distros and migrated from sysvinit to systemd.
https://news.opensuse.org/2011/12/22/systemd-e2-80-93-boot-f...
https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/4lzxs3/why_did_a...
Misleading in that Ubuntu and Fedora did use Upstart but not in its native mode, they used it in its sysvinit compatibility mode. This is almost identical to sysvinit, so from the point of view of a user or a package maintainer it was functionally barely distinguishable from sysvinit.
OpenRC was considered by Debian, but 7 out of 8 members of the technical committee preferred both systemd and Upstart to OpenRC (Ian Jackson preferred sysvinit over OpenRC and "further discussion" over every other option).
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=727708;msg...