galdor, 1 year ago

@civodul Naïve question from someone who does not know anything about Shepherd. What do you gain compared to Systemd?

I'm aware of the controversy around Systemd (or more precisely around the way it was forced into most Linux distributions), but at the end of the day it does the job.

civodul, 1 year ago

@galdor The Shepherd actually predates systemd (though in a different form); it’s totally unrelated to the “controversy”.

The goal is to have a tool that’s extensible and hackable, and in Scheme. The latter makes sense in the context of Guix System since that gives a uniform programming environment.

For example, we extended it to run daemons in containers:
https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2017/running-system-services-in-containers/

civodul, 1 year ago

@galdor Now, let’s be clear: the Shepherd remains minimalistic and there are certainly many features systemd offers today that the Shepherd lacks.

That it’s extensible and can reuse high-level libraries should allow us to mitigate that, without sacrificing minimalism.