- a very opaque structure: it's actually not that opaque, since configuration files are still plain text, and better yet with more structure, but it first appears as inscrutable, since the programs aren't shell scripts;
- a set of new tools to learn: Systemd doesn't make use of the existing Unix tool-set (sed, awk, etc), ie. the vocabulary most sysadmins are familiar with in this ecosystem.
It seems on the outset that Systemd is trying to get away from the traditional Unix "one program should do one and only one thing well" (which is colloquial phrasing for separation of concerns).
Still, one idea that occurred to me is that in the early days of Unix, system programs might have been quite simple, with very few options (that man pages were probably very short), but that's clearly not the case nowadays. So haven't we left the "one program should do one and only one thing well" paradigm a long time ago anyway?
Actually, I think that one crucial issue with systemd is its specialization: can it be used for anything else than service management? At first, this seems to clash with the Unix principle, but even awk and sed are meant to do one thing, yet their field of action is very general, not just confined to handle one style of files or perform one style of transformation.
I think however that a lot of hate comes from:
- a very opaque structure: it's actually not that opaque, since configuration files are still plain text, and better yet with more structure, but it first appears as inscrutable, since the programs aren't shell scripts;
- a set of new tools to learn: Systemd doesn't make use of the existing Unix tool-set (sed, awk, etc), ie. the vocabulary most sysadmins are familiar with in this ecosystem.
It seems on the outset that Systemd is trying to get away from the traditional Unix "one program should do one and only one thing well" (which is colloquial phrasing for separation of concerns).
Still, one idea that occurred to me is that in the early days of Unix, system programs might have been quite simple, with very few options (that man pages were probably very short), but that's clearly not the case nowadays. So haven't we left the "one program should do one and only one thing well" paradigm a long time ago anyway?
Actually, I think that one crucial issue with systemd is its specialization: can it be used for anything else than service management? At first, this seems to clash with the Unix principle, but even awk and sed are meant to do one thing, yet their field of action is very general, not just confined to handle one style of files or perform one style of transformation.