Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au> writes:
If systemd just did init, then nobody would give a damn, but it's absorbing way too many low-level system functions into itself - udev has been merged; it does logging; has half-arsed substitutes for ntpd, cron, automount, inetd, and network configuration.
Incidentally, upstart also 1. claimed to be compatible with inittab[0]; and 2. planned to replace at least cron and automount. [0] in fact all it supported was one line -- it used a bit of sed to determine the default runlevel. All other entries in inittab were silently ignored.
For a while it will still be possible to hang on to sysvinit or upstart or whatever but eventually the effort required to keep everything working with dependencies breaking stuff all the time will be too great.
Speaking as someone who has suffered under upstart since 2008, it's definitely not worth keeping -- at least not on servers and embedded systems. (I don't care about desktops.) upstart is systemd with a smaller budget and less demagoguery.