Products · Product
sysvinit
Raised as a usability problem by 9 people on Hacker News over 13 years (2014–2026), in 10 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Init scripts break easily and cost admins maintenance timeUnreviewed
20142026- Customizing init scripts is undocumented, conflicts on upgrades, and must be redone each time2026-02-03
- Writing init scripts is so painful that people resort to supervisor2016-05-06
- Service init scripts break easily and are hard to maintain, costing the admin time2015-10-09
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 11 complaints
- Customizing init scripts is undocumented, conflicts on upgrades, and must be redone each time2026-02-03
- Restart may silently not work because each init script implements it differently2025-08-18
- Determining correct startup order means manually reasoning through many daemon dependencies and quirks2024-02-10
- Hard to use, error prone, and forgotten between infrequent uses2022-01-08
- Gives no useful errors, and inherited shell environment variables make failures hard to debug2021-03-31
- Packages break in many ways; hacks needed for errors, disabling, PID files, settings2020-05-04
- Finding startup failure messages requires wading through verbose output and hunting for scattered info2020-05-04
- Had to write complicated bash scripts to get apps running, with nondeterministic behavior2016-10-03
- Writing init scripts is so painful that people resort to supervisor2016-05-06
- Service init scripts break easily and are hard to maintain, costing the admin time2015-10-09
- Incompatible ps command line options plague it and clones to this day2014-02-22