GNU Shepherd 0.5 Init System Released

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GNU Shepherd 0.5 Init System Released

Shepherd, the init/service manager of the GNU system with GNU Herd and can be used as an alternative to systemd on Linux systems as well, is up to version 0.5...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNU-Shepherd-0.5-Released

[tildearrow]

Typo:

Shepherd, the init/service manager of the GNU system with GNU Herd

[wswartzendruber]

I wonder what the Debian people think...

[gens]

It's not an init in a way phoronix readers think of inits. An init usually does other things implicitly. It's more of a "service" manager. (It can easily be used as a full init, as shown)
There is no need to mention systemd.
The "herd" in the official description is a pun.

The official description is good.
"The GNU Daemon Shepherd or GNU Shepherd, formerly known as GNU dmd, is a service manager that looks after the herd of system services. It provides a replacement for the service-managing capabilities of SysV-init (or any other init) with a both powerful and beautiful dependency-based system with a convenient interface. It is intended for use on GNU/Hurd, but it is supposed to work on every POSIX-like system where Guile is available. In particular, it is used as PID 1 by the Guix System Distribution (GuixSD)."

Personally i think that a simple functional language such as scheme is perfect for these things.

[starshipeleven]

It's not an init in a way phoronix readers think of inits. An init usually does other things implicitly. It's more of a "service" manager. (It can easily be used as a full init, as shown)

Could you explain more what does an init do "implicitly" besides service management? I always thought init and "service manager" were more or less the same.

[You-]

Does it use the same syntax style as systemd?

[Vistaus]

Does anyone use this? Yes, I know, I'm not always so keen on seeing these kind of questions, but in this case, I never hear anything about Shepherd outside of Phoronix as everyone is talking about SystemD and whatnot. So does anyone use this and if so, what is their experience? (I'm not going to use it, but I do like to hear experiences )

[gens]

Could you explain more what does an init do "implicitly" besides service management? I always thought init and "service manager" were more or less the same.

Things like setting the PATH, making the loopback device, mounting various virtual filesystems like /proc, making directories in transient directories like /run, initializing /dev/urandom with a seed, etc. You can check out slackwares init scripts at https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackw...ripts/scripts/ , rc.S is the example you want.

Not to say that all of that can't be a "service". But i always found the word "service" to be vague at best. It's always talked about in the context of programs that provide something (like nginx, for example) and never in the context of just a simple kernel configuration (like urandom) or userspace configuration (like PATH).

[cybertraveler]

Interesting post. I'd never heard of this. Thanks.

There's quite a few high quality & well designed init systems & service managers out there. A couple:

• Upstart (some versions of Ubuntu use it)
• Runit (as used by Void)

[blae]

I would wish for Michael to not use weasel words in articles like this. When you give an article a spin like you do here, you're inviting for the thread to become a heap full of trolls.

The forums are already bad enough as it is.