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This was as entertaining as it was informative. Feedback If you need help or have a question for Customer Service, contact us. They are the victims of rising house prices, a difficult job market for young people and, worst of all, the mental anguish of living with someone who used to brush your teeth for you.
Don't let yourself go into "child mode" just because it's the house you grew up in. Housework is just as tediously joyless for your parents as for the rest of us. Do your share, or forfeit the right to call yourself a grown-ass adult. The major advantage of living at home is the price. Unless your parents are charging you full market-rate rent in which case, surely move?
If you're working, living at home and not saving a penny, you're basically walking blindfold into the future humming show tunes. It won't end well. Know how, if not exactly when, you plan to leave. In the darker moments of parent-child co-habitation, when you see in your parents' flawed behaviour a dark portent of your own future failure, and ball your hands into fists, and gulp back the urge to punch a lamp, the knowledge that you have an escape plan will be your only defence against an existential tantrum.
In my view experienced sys admins are generally slow and cautious in response to major system changes rather than an unruly pitchfork wielding mob. We are primarily users, with occasional patches or bug reports and internal glue code as our contributions to free and open source. If legitimate complaints from the most prolific customers of linux are brought up and ignored over a sufficient period of time, some fracturing of the community will eventually occur.
Linux is dominant in the server and cloud space and doing well in embedded. Vendors and projects who ignore or attempt to quash the requirements of those environments will eventually suffer the consequences. Philosophically, about freedom, bferrell is correct. One reason we choose free and open source in my shop is freedom of choice. Being able to choose from a plethora of tools to find the best combination for any given job has been a boon for free software acceptance. If that changes to an Apple like vendor lock-in attitude other solutions will be sought or created.
The next year or two will tell how well it will eventually work out in our purposely heterogeneous shop. The real systemd debate is going to last a while. In fact, in the systems admin space, it's barely getting started. Posted Nov 14, 4: Posted Nov 14, 9: Lennart Poettering Journal files are mostly append-only files. We keep adding to the end as we go, only updating minimal indexes and bookkeeping in the front earlier parts of the files. As soon as they rotate they are entirely read-only, never modified again.
When you use a tool like "journalctl" to read the journal files both the active and the rotated files are implicitly merged, so that they appear as a single stream again. Now, our strategy to rotate-on-corruption is the safest thing we can do, as we make sure that the internal corruption is frozen in time, and not attempted to be "fixed" by a tool, that might end up making things worse. After all, in the case the often-run writing code really fucks something up, then it is not necessarily a good idea to try to make it better by running a tool on it that tries to fix it up again, a tool that is necessarily a lot more complex, and also less tested.
Now, of course, having corrupted files isn't great, and we should make sure the files even when corrupted stay as accessible as possible. We do this implicitly on every access. This logic also has a major benefit: File systems such as ext4 have an fsck tool since they don't have the luxury to just rotate the fs away and fix the structure on read: I hope this explains the rationale here a bit more.
Meanwhile, the format it's replacing, if corrupted, well, let's see -- you lose a line of syslog. Maybe you lose a bunch of other lines. But recovery from that is automatic; you only lose a line of syslog data around that touched by the corruption. You certainly don't lose a whole file. This is not a sensible attitude to log data unless you consider log data fundamentally unimportant -- and in that case, why on earth are you recording it at all?
Posted Nov 20, 2: Maybe I misread but isn't that what journalctl does, skip invalid records and start back up at the next valid record, without touching the original file so you always have a pristine copy with the corruption intact? Logs are different than filesystems in that they are write once, read many, you never want to rewrite history, even if that history is corrupt due to a bug. Posted Nov 20, 3: Posted Nov 20, 4: I don't know if that's how it actually works, that's just my first idea of how I think it should work. Posted Nov 21, 9: You could also have an array of 4 byte little-endian unsigned integers, terminated by 4 bytes of zero.
It would be just as easy to find the start of the next message as it is in text. We're pretty spoiled these days and don't have to worry about our messages getting off by a bit or two. I recall modems where if you weren't using parity or was it stop bits you might lose sync and anything could happen. Anyway, there might be valid complaints about the particular design of journald's binary format. But just because it is binary doesn't necessarily make it unusually hard to recover or read.
Posted Nov 18, 0: No, it doesn't end up empty. In my experience, a corrupted journal file is still completely readable and searchable, except for its final entry. Since the tools don't expose how individual journal files are being accessed, this corruption simply appears as if you'd lost a single log message. Yes, it's possible some header corruption could mean an entire file is unreadable. I haven't personally seen that, but I can imagine that it's a concern for some people.
You can limit the damage by ensuring the files get rotated frequently. Posted Nov 18, 2: But it sounds like something easily detectable by the libraries that read the journal files so other apps, not just journalctl, would get the fix , and it still wouldn't result in an "empty" journal. Posted Nov 18, 4: This is one of the problems with binary logs The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate.
Posted Nov 18, 5: Look, I'm not denying that there are bugs that can corrupt the logs or lose large numbers of log messages. But the original claim -- that corruption yields an "empty" journal that can only be made non-empty through the use of "special commands" -- is patently false.
Posted Nov 18, This thread has brought out some of the tradeoffs, though, such as a recommendation to rotate the log frequently to minimize the impact of possible corruption. For the servers I administer, I would prefer logging to a text file and risking loss of a fraction of a second of logs if an entry is corrupt instead of rotating a journal hourly and potentially losing 59 minutes should there be corruption.
Maybe that was what it was referring to. At any rate, it's just not true. When a journal file is rotated whether that be because journald has detected corruption in it, or because it's reached its maximum size, or because the admin has simply asked for it by sending SIGUSR2 to the journald process , its contents are still read automatically by journalctl when searching and iterating through the logs. As far as I know, the only way to create an empty journal is to literally remove all of these journal files.
I meant to express a design preference rather to critique any particular software with regard to text vs. According to one post below, interesting defaults are being set for logging configuration in RHEL7. The configuration described looks like a band aid to side step this and possibly other issues. Posted Nov 19, 0: The official answer to that can be found at http: I have read through the journal file format specification [1] and the code that implements it [2], and from what I can tell it looks reasonably straight-forward. I have no doubt bugs will be discovered.
That is inevitable with any non-trivial code. But there's really no reason to believe that these bugs will go unfixed. It's not as if it's "new" code, anyway -- people have been using it now for years.
Posted Nov 14, 5: For your misfeature request I'll focus on a short list for the journal. These are already well known and discussed. The themes however are telling and appear to exist in other portions of the systemd space. Custom binary log format. Lack of log shipping. The requirement to run multiple log daemons. Web access to log files. The binary format of the journal is an unnecessary non feature.
When we want binary format we already ship to a central server and a proven database of some sort, with a web accessible interface. At the very least the journal could use an existing vetted database back end. At the point of origin venerable grep friendly text files are usually enough. A structured format is great but in the end it's application dependent, binary or not. Having to run two logging daemons to ship logs for anything started under systemd is a poor design. Adding non features like the web accessibility while treating the rest as non issues due to band aids existing is unfortunate.
These items truly need to be fixed, time will tell. Posted Nov 14, Are you aware that on RHEL7 the binary format is just in-memory? The on disk persistent log uses syslog. Not mandatory, and a separate component from journald. Again, "do one thing, do it well". I remember situations, though, in shops without that kind of setup wanting to look at e. So, keeping an indexed binary copy of the log isn't a dealbreaker for me as long as syslog is directly written to as well.
I see it as similar to having find and locatedb - I wouldn't want to have to depend on locatedb not being corrupt, but locate can be handy to find a file more quickly than find or ls alone. The main thing I am concerned about with a dependency-based init is having a situation where a service that isn't critical for the server's purpose ends up blocking a business-critical application from being started due to failed dependencies. On the other hand, one might instead simply go through service-by-service and make a service depend on only the 20 out of services it actually needs as someone else replied on a thread here about NetworkManger: Posted Nov 21, As a database guy myself, I consider this about the most stupid option possible!!!
By all means use a database to INDEX the log file, but the log itself should be a streaming write - any other choice is! I know there's argument about what journald does, but the reason for doing it is sound - to maximise data retention in the case of a problem, and minimise the possibility of data loss. Okay, I can only speak for Pick-like databases, but every log message would need to be allocated a sequential or GUID key. On a multi-CPU system collisions are almost inevitable.
I can't imagine a Pick system keeping up under the load, and given that they kick seven bells out of relational for speed, no relational engine would stand a chance. Then there's the matter of actually writing the data. Step one is to write a transaction log entry. Step two, hash the key and append the record to the appropriate block. Step three, is the table overflowing, and if so expand it, logging that as you do so. Step four, close off the transaction log and commit.
Now how many opportunities are there in that database write for a screw-up to happen? That's even before you give the OS level and the disk subsystem the opportunity to screw things up for you!
Even worse, step three presents a marvellous opportunity for trashing old log messages as the database block gets split into two. I don't know how other DB engines handle it, but they're not going to be any better at it! At the end of the day, the ONLY way that makes any sense is to stream the messages straight to disk. You're still relying on the OS and disk not to screw you up, but there's no way round that. Cheers, Wol The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate. Oh yes they are. Non-corruption under conditions of power loss and -ENOSPC is routinely tested in any half-competent database system hell, even sqlite.
Perhaps especially sqlite, their test harness is awesome. Unfortunately these things slow everything down, quite a lot, and in the end you end up writing everything at least twice once to a log of some kind, once to the DB and taking noticeably more space to do it. I concur, writing syslogs to a database if you don't have a reason to do it e. But, then, existing projects like syslog-ng have been able to do this for many years.
So this too isn't a justification for journald. Rsyslog will let you insert a bunch of messages at once batch mode , which does wonders for the performance of inserting logs into databases. But it's generally not the right thing to do because of the performance overhead both inserting and retrieving The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate.
Posted Nov 26, Which is totally at odds with the requirements of a logging system. A simple streaming write is the best way to ensure the information you actually want makes its way to disk before everything goes pear-shaped. The reason I explained how Pick would save the record is to stress the point that ANY problem, at ANY stage of the process, that causes a write failure, will cause the corresponding log entry to be thrown away!!!
NOT what is wanted!!! The only thing that's going to screw up a streaming write is corruption in the kernel or a screwed-up disk. Those will also affect a database, but there's a far bigger window for those problems and other problems too to screw up a database. Oh - and as for sqlite's vaunted robustness, I believe Firefox uses it.
Why oh why then does my wife's Firefox give me so much grief with data issues? She has mental health issues, and her login session gets a lot of abuse My Firefox, on the same system, doesn't give me grief at all. This, in Debian, is just false: Right now it does get installed as a dependency for some packages, but as long as you are willing to use a DE that is not GNOME none of those packages are required.
I've been doing it for a few months, now, and while there have been a few bugs, they have all been prompty fixed, and my system is just working as it was before systemd became default. Posted Nov 14, 0: These people are free to submit patches to ensure that packages support the non-systemd init system of their choice, and package maintainers should be encouraged to take these on. Hence Ian Jackson's GR that tries to enforce this. Also note that the GR is not about not having to install systemd, it is about not having to run systemd's PID 1 process.
Even if Ian's GR is accepted, it will be perfectly fine for packages to depend on systemd as long as running systemd's PID 1 process is not mandatory e. All Debian packages worked in Wheezy without systemd. If systemd proponents had merely added support for systemd without breaking Debian packages then there wouldn't be a problem. But systemd was never about technology. Systemd was always about control. And so systemd proponents broke support for non-systemd systems. Systemd proponents broke Debian packages.
Systemd proponents should repair the damage they caused to Debian. Posted Nov 14, 6: As a matter of fact precisely one of us does have long-term memory. I remember answering your question and I see down thread that you then acknowledged my answer: Nobody cares about Gnome3 being tied to systemd. The policykit-1 breakage is the most serious. There are several other broken packages and more will likely be broken if the GR fails to stop them. Posted Nov 14, 7: Are these packages not working properly without systemd? They won't even install without chunks of systemd.
Does booting Debian with SysV init or upstart somehow stops these packages from functioning? There are many cases of software working better on Windows than on Linux. I use Linux instead of Windows because of freedom, not ease of use. I oppose systemd's regression to 's technological lockin because it is important to retain the freedom for us and future generations to innovate. Most servers in the world came to run Linux because pre-systemd Linux was a great platform for innovation.
The FreeDesktop crowd never got anywhere and forced adoption of their bad ideas will seriously harm Linux. Systemd is not portable to other OSs so it loses synergy. Systemd is so tied to RedHat's business goals that they explicitly reject portability patches. Systemd uses marshalled internal communications. We learned the advantages of text streams for all but the lowest levels e. TCP in the 's. D-Bus is like a 's mainframe come back from the dead. But the most serious problem is the monolithic entanglement. This drastically raises the barrier to innovation in every area systemd absorbs.
Making it harder for you and me to innovate is very bad. Making it harder for the next generation to innovate is totally unacceptable.
In short, systemd is the sort of monolithically entangled software I might have designed in the 's before we all learned better. By all means elaborate what you mean by this. Why is RedHat trying so hard to force adoption of 's systemd technology? Posted Nov 15, 1: I did not ask you for ignant 's metaphor so under the assumption you dont have shit for brains clarify how you came to that assumption or conclusion that systemd is being somehow run by or tied to RedHat's business goals.
Somehow you came to that conclusion and I ask how. Posted Nov 15, If you required some confirmation about my mood then you simply could have asked and I would have answered that it's like the Icelandic weather if you dont like it just wait a minute I'm not really sure why this is objectionable, mind. Posted Nov 18, 1: Especially if said init system is freely available for all other Linux distributions to use, and is governed by a diverse developer community that includes representatives from practically all distributions.
In the realm of init systems there seems to be little demand for synergy. Every single Unix derivative is doing its own thing these days. It would be nice — from an abstract POV — to have something that is usable on several platforms but the interest doesn't really seem to be there among the people who are really doing the work and making the decisions. This is not a systemd-only phenomenon.
You're still at liberty to innovate all you want. Feel free to come up with something that is notably better than systemd. People will love you for that kind of innovation. Your problem, though, mgb, is that you don't actually innovate like the systemd people do. You don't have it in you. There is no way in hell that you could make something that ends up only half as good or as popular as systemd, even if your life depended on it.
So instead you spend your time dissing the actual innovations of people whose discarded printouts you're not worthy to carry to the wastepaper bin. Write something new that other people will want to use, and that two years from now will be part of all mainstream Linux distributions. Then you get to moan about how terrible systemd is for innovation, and maybe somebody will take you seriously. Given the advances in software engineering in the last forty years, one would have to try really hard to design a plumbing layer as harmful as systemd.
Please enlighten us with an example of "a modern component architecture". Now, I think the 70's is probably a bit early, but the 80's or early 90's seems very appropriate. As a somewhat relevant side note, there's a reason that the respected standards bodies require multiple independent implementations of something before they consider it for a standard The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate. Posted Nov 15, 5: I have my own small version in pure Rust, for example. Posted Nov 15, 6: Posted Dec 11, 3: For anyone that doesn't understand, I've put my art skills to work and made a simplified diagram: Posted Nov 16, Considering that he doesn't appear to have looked at systemd either, that wouldn't come as a huge surprise.
Posted Nov 14, 8: The entire fuss in Debian started because Gnome required systemd. Since then, there have been patches accepted that eliminate this requirement, but the whole fuss was exactly because DD decided to make a package only work with systemd.
It is reasonable for a Debian package maintainer to go along with this, especially given that systemd is the designated default init system on Debian, and that GNOME, while it serves as Debian's default desktop environment, is essentially an optional feature. The proper way of fixing this is for those people who want GNOME to work without systemd-as-PID-1 to figure out a way to make this work, and that in fact happened even in the absence of a GR. There are people who would like Debian to work on a FreeBSD kernel or the HURD rather than Linux, but they're doing the required work themselves — they don't go for a GR compelling all Debian developers to do extra work to ensure that their packages support those systems, so why should non-systemd init systems be special in that respect?
As an example, https: However, I would expect this code to bitrot over time. Downstream developers be that end-users or distribution maintainers could contribute and keep it operational. That's not entirely accurate. GNOME was changed to use logind, but it is not a "rather than".
After using logind, the cgroups change resulted in logind relying on systemd. Due to other changes, not using logind and some related but way easier daemons will result in reduced functionality. Too reduced for Debian. Ian GR proposer asserted that changes happen due to "marketing".. Such patches would obviously be expected to contain conspicuous documentation explaining the loss of functionality, if any, incurred when running GNOME on a non-systemd system, to create informed consent on the part of users.
This is reminding people that this whole debian systemd debase started from the debian gnome developers deciding to make gnome require systemd I agree that the Gnome developers should be free to do so, but it's only up to them alone if Debian doesn't use Gnome as it's default GUI If the Gnome DDs want freedom to do anything they want with Gnome, with nobody else questioning them, then the answer is to have a different GUI be the default that takes the rest of the system into account and coordinates with everyone else.
The position of being the default package brings a lot of users, but it also brings limitations on what it's reasonable for the maintainers to do. It's only a problem when a company that's a Monopoly uses the power of that Monopoly in bad ways. These ways explicitly include: Back to the topic. Using the position of being the default to force changes elsewhere in the system is a problem. It's a problem if Gnome does it to force systemd into the system, or if systemd uses it's position as the default init to take over other functions logging, cron, etc The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate.
This is exactly what people are asking for as part of the Debian GR. Too many people related to systemd have publicly stated that they consider supporting anything else to be a waste of time, and have talked about refusing patches that would allow for it to work without some of it's existing requirements or on non-linux systems because they think that the complication of the codebase is more of a problem than the benefit of supporting other systems. You're re-stating the position of the systemd core team. This has precisely no bearing on what the maintainers of unrelated packages in Debian those which might or might not come with upstream systemd or sysvinit support ought to do.
In particular, the systemd core team can't be compelled to do or not do something by Debian passing a GR. On the other hand, if package upstreams decide to avail themselves of systemd-specific features, it is unreasonable to expect that the Debian maintainers of such packages develop support for other init systems on the off-chance; it is much more reasonable to expect that those people who actually want to use the package in question with another init system should do the work, and that the Debian package maintainers simply propagate the outcome for the benefit of other users.
If the Debian package maintainers do decide that they don't mind doing the extra work themselves then that is of course also fine. Finally, taking outside patches for extra feature support isn't actually unusual in the Debian ecosystem, and it is safe to say that the vast majority of Debian developers — who are generally reasonable folks — will welcome that kind of assistance. If the Debian developer in charge of a package is adamantly opposed to accepting a sensible-looking and technically sound patch simply because they don't like what it does, there are ways of resolving such impasses that do not involve project-wide GRs.
So far in the systemd case this hasn't happened; we have had the opposite case where a maintainer didn't want to take on a patch that contributed systemd support for their package because they didn't like systemd — but as I said there are easier ways to sort this out. Every constitutional grouping of people eventually faces a challenge where a group of constituents eventually tries to get a rule passed through one of the rule making bodies or by direct vote that is directly contrary to the basic rules of the constitution. Not all of them survive this attempt.
I fear for Debian when one group of people tries to force another to do something. This is really really boring now. Anyone serious about putting in effort of forking now over the systemd dep that has come up through logind as a replacement for consolekit, could have really made a difference in when consolekit became a dead project upstream.
You so could have made a positive impact for your chosen cause in Could have really made a difference and made sure consolekit was still a viable upstream project Back in , there was an expectation that people interested in consolekit, specifically Ubuntu, would be stepping up forking it and maintaining the fork. That anticipated fork didn't actually happen and Ubuntu actually moved to logind. No idea why Ubuntu didn't stick with CK.
There's no real discussion on that. Seems a bit of wasted energy to get mad 2 years later about projects choosing to no longer depend exclusively on an unmaintained codebase, and have moved on to use something that is actively maintained. Would you like to borrow my time machine and go back to and fork consolekit when it was a timely option?
I think you must be talking about Fedora which is indeed a lost cause. Debian still has consolekit. Meanwhile Erik Koegel forked consolekit2 so Debian will not have to continue maintaining FreeDesktop's software. The fact that Debian still has consolekit as a package doesn't change the fact that it has a dead and unmaintained upstream and other maintained projects should be relying on it. And honestly it doesn't look to be actively maintained as a package in debian either as there are provided patches sitting in the debian bug tracker for years now.
Officially made public in October , commit log suggests work started on it in feb Its existence now does not change the decision making leading up to October prior to it being known to exist. And it too late to make the jesse freeze without special consideration. So it doesn't even really change the situation for maintainers in the jessie release timescale either. Really too bad it took 2 years for that fork announcement to happen.
One has to wonder on the delay there. Like maybe if Debian had announced the intent to switch to systemd earlier, the fork would have happened earlier as well and there wouldn't have been a 2 year delay like this. I mean seriously the consolekit2 fork was almost too late, even projects being run by maintainers who have previously voiced concern over systemd dependency. For example Lightdm was ready to drop CK support this month because of a lack of a maintained CK codebase.
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Once consolekit2 shows up in deb packaging, that will be an interesting discussion. Now RHEL 7 is supported by the 7. Installing the package quickly revealed that the latest tsm client does not ship native systemd unit files so IBM is not getting with the program and generally what's happening on the 21 century like their lack of proper 64bit support in plethora of their applications shows. Third party tools can be used to convert the package to Debian format for installation. IBM Support will not accept calls related to package conversion or installation of converted packages.
If "Revisiting How We Put Together Linux Systems" comes widely accepted or something similar that might change as well and companies like IBM could provide a single installation package and thus provide the same level of support for all systemd based distributions regardless what they are called. Posted Nov 13, 4: I installed systemd on my Raspberry Pis as a try and it turns out it just works, makes them slightly faster to boot, and make the service file for my daemon short and clean.
This is not being a fan, this is being pragmatic. I also run the upgrades on that one to make sure things don't break before upgrading the rest: Seems I did not commit the upstart one but I can do if that's of interest to somebody I'll have to test it first though Also, I am not sure the sysvinit one is on par with the systemd one, as systemd restarts my daemon if it disappears for any reason Reading your comments gives the strong impression that you don't know very much about systemd.
Lots of words, very little relevant content. And often it was. But I think we all should just calm down and let's see what happens. Debian developers will have their GR, numerous upstream developers will either rely on systemd functionality or not and many many distro packagers will spent their time as they see fit. The systemd developers will continue to do their stuff as they are doing it now. Let the code speak for itself! I personally will try to abstain from any systemd debate for at least a couple of months and I guess in years we'll know how everything played out.
But unlike you I couldn't care less about the whole systemd debate, and I can't understand how people get so emotional about it. Just like any new stuff I'll have to learn how to use it and that's pretty much with it. I suppose I'm part of the silent majority but you may disagree. Aside from that, systemd technically makes some decisions I strongly disagree with, but that alone would never make me so upset.
I have disagreed with things before and then just didn't use them and never engaged in any emacs vs. UNIX system virtually abandoned sysvint knowing a core part like init or specifically a system management have to be designed for their own kernels. People of different roles being able to work together, I think, is what is really at play here. Until the Debian GR was announced, the idea of consulting stakeholders outside of a relatively small group of insiders appears to have been avoided.
I don't see it as much of a long-term technical matter for server use. As others have pointed out, I would look forward to being being able to log directly to syslog. It sure would be nice to have the default for viewing logs changed to show the entire line instead of abbreviating with " In my experience with SMF, though, it doesn't seem to have gotten much reaction either way from users of Solaris. The main difference from the sysadmin perspective being that it makes boot-time troubleshooting a little weirder. Otherwise, I haven't encountered an SMF manifest being supplied by a piece of software that wasn't written by either Sun or Veritas.
Even nine years after the release of Solaris 10, they are still what I have seen in standard use on that platform by 3rd party applications and sysadmins. Of course, both generally had to maintain non-SMF Solaris 9 configurations for much of that time, just as enterprise Linux server admins will have to maintain older enterprise Linux releases for a number of years. Something like LiveUpgrade is what I had been missing after migrating servers from Solaris. It already has been changed in more recent versions of systemd. Lennart The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate.
Btw, thanks to whomever came up with the name rsyslog. I really like it much better than svc: To me, this seems to miss the point. One could equally say "There is plenty of experience by now to show that Intel-based systems still work when MS-Windows is installed". It isn't about whether it works, it is about what it is like to work with. So some important issues are complexity, transparency, familiarity, learning curves, etc. This, on the other hand, is spot on.
All the heat makes is very hard to address the other issues coherently. OK, but most user don't work with the init system, right? It's just a few developers that are affected, and far less people than are participating in discussions, right? OK, but as was said before, the learning curve for the old init or even upstart, when starting from scratch not your case I suppose is less steep with systemd At least that's my personal experience after recently writing the service file for my [very simple] daemon for sysvinit, upstart and systemd.
I would go as far as to say that your voice would probably be one of the most useful, but maybe it gets buried in the noise I used to maintain a Slackware-based distribution for a private company about 10 years ago. I wonder if that is true. I don't have any data - do you? It isn't just developers that might need to work with an init system, it is also sysadmins, and many hobbyists serve as their own sysadmin.
You've probably heard the quote: With systemd, lots of simple things really are simple.