Please mention Shepherd (and other init systems) in the discussion about the GR proposals.

[Svante Signell]

Please, somebody!!

On Mon, 2019-12-02 at 11:32 +0100, Svante Signell wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Can somebody already involved in the discussion about init system GR on
> debian-
> vote (Ian, Adam?) add comments on alternate init systems, other than systemd
> and
> sysvint. The focus is far too oriented towards sysvinit and not other
> alternatives are mentioned, like OpenRC, initng, runit, monit, s6,
> daemontools,
> and especially Shepherd, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Init
> 
> Below is a quote from one mail on init systems on debian-vote:
> https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2019/12/msg00032.html
> Subject: My analysis of the proposals
> Uoti Urpala:
> > In short: there is little to no worthwhile work being done on any
> > alternatives to systemd. What is happening is some people trying to
> > keep sysvinit working to about the level it did in 2014, while doing
> > very little fundamental development to the system that would fix its
> > widely recognized flaws. Such work will not help innovation, will not
> > produce a plausible alternative to systemd, and is not worth
> > supporting
> 
> Some of Shepherd's selling points, see
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Guix#GNU_Shepherd_Init_system
> 
> GNU Shepherd Init system
> 
> Guix System uses the GNU Daemon Shepherd as its init system, which is
> developed
> in tandem with Guix and is written in Guile as well. It was previously known
> as
> "dmd", which stood for "Daemon managing Daemons" or "Daemons-managing Daemon",
> but changed names to avoid collision with the Digital Mars D compiler.[34]
> 
> Shepherd supplies user-space functionality asynchronously as services, which
> under Shepherd are generic functions and object data types that are exported
> for
> use by the Shepherd to extend the base operating system in some defined way.
> In
> contrast to systemd, a userspace shepherd process runs as that user. Core to
> the
> Shepherd model of user space initialisation is the concept of the extension, a
> form of composability where services are designed to be layered onto other
> services, augmenting them with more elaborate or specialised behaviours as
> desired.[35] This expresses the instantiation-based dependency relationships
> found in many modern init systems,[36] making the system modular, but also
> allows services to interact variadically with other services in arbitrary
> ways.
> 
> Shepherd also provides so-called virtual services which allow dynamic dispatch
> over a class of related service objects, such as all those which instantiate a
> mail transfer agent (MTA) for the system.[37] A system governed via the
> Shepherd
> daemon can represent its user space as a directed acyclic graph, with the
> "system-service" − responsible for early phases of boot and init − as its
> root,
> and all subsequently initialised services as extensions to system-service's
> functionality, either directly or transitively over other services.[35][38]
> 
> Being both written and configured in Guile Scheme, GNU Shepherd is intended to
> be highly programmable by the system administrator, but it can also be used to
> manage per-user profiles of unprivileged daemons and services.[39] Its
> services
> and configuration are stored uniformly as object-oriented Scheme code, and
> while
> a core set of services are provided with the basic Guix System
> Distribution,[40]
> arbitrary new services can be flexibly declared, and through Guile's object
> system, GOOPS, existing services can be redefined at the user's discretion by
> asking the Shepherd to dynamically rewrite services in specified ways on
> instantiation.[41][42]
> 
> GNU Shepherd was originally designed to work with GNU Hurd, and was later
> adopted by Guix System.[43]
> ****************************************
> 
> I'm planning to package Shepherd for Debian but will not be able to make a
> proposal until voting is due.
> 
> Thank you in advance!
>