init ≠ service manager

[calimeroteknik]

Hello!

Excellent initiative. It would help immensely if it could avoid falling right into systemd's propaganda by confusing two very distinct concepts that can, within the same system, be sourced from different software projects:

On the one hand, we have the init (pid 1), which keeps the service manager alive, and reaps zombie processes.
See the bottom of this page for the source code of an init to run as pid 1: https://ewontfix.com/14/

On the other hand, we have the world of process/service managers, of which any one can be run by the above init, examples:

• Init scripts, yes, the /etc/init.d/yourservice stuff! That's a service manager. Not part of sysvinit, contrary to popular belief.
• The s6 service supervisor https://skarnet.org/software/s6/s6-svscan.html
• Runit's service manager, which is often used in combination with the init from sysvinit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runit#Usage

Systemd confuses, conflates and lumps these two components (and more) into one big tentacular software project.
Don't fall for it and keep making the difference!

[calimeroteknik]

Note: the main advantage in keeping the two separate, is that you can only have one init, but you can have many process/service supervisors. (some of which would run as children of others)