Re: A dumb question

From: Laurent Bercot <ska-supervision_at_skarnet.org>
Date: Tue, 02 May 2017 09:34:52 +0000

> "It's old software. Its last version is from 2014."

  Old? Let's see...
  The MTA used by this very mailing-list is netqmail-1.06, i.e.
qmail (latest version released in 1996) with user-contributed patches,
the latest of which is from 2005.
  So yeah, that's 12 years old software. It could be going to middle
school right now.
  And it works. I think the usual motto is "if it ain't broken, don't
fix it". :)

  The latest runit version is from 2014 - that's only 3 years old.
It's not even kindergarten age, come on. Did you know that some Linux
distributions still ship GNU make 3.81, a version of GNU make that is
11 years old?

  systemd, on the other hand, hasn't left the maternity hospital - but
how could it? it's such a fragile baby, it needs constant attention,
it can barely leave the incubator. If you ask me, it should never have
left the womb in the first place. :-Þ


>Has Runit been so well tested and hardened,
>is it such a simple codebase? Or are there not enough interested,
>capable people maintaining the project?

  The answer to both questions is partly yes.
  There is one lingering bug in runit that I know of, but it only
triggers
in extreme corner cases. Apart from that, it just works, does what it's
supposed to do, and is a very simple codebase, so there's no need to
constantly tinker with it.
  It is also true that it would benefit from closer maintenance.
Gerrit Pape, runit's author, is still around and still reads this list,
but is not as active as he was a few years ago (typically during runit
development). Fortunately, there are not many feature requests.

  As others have mentioned, if you're looking for a closely maintained
supervision suite that is similar to runit, may I recommend
http://skarnet.org/software/s6/ ? It's not going away any time soon,
and neither is its author - I hope ;) Lots of work have been put into
s6 in the last few years, more than in any other supervision suite,
with the possible exception of nosh; the fact that Void Linux has not
yet switched to s6 is proof that runit is still working well enough for
them and they don't feel the need to change.

--
  Laurent
Received on Tue May 02 2017 - 09:34:52 UTC

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