New startup system: Epoch

srs5694 · Posted: Mon Nov 11, 2013 2:28 pm Post subject: New startup system: Epoch

Hi,

I ran across an announcement on another forum for a new startup system called Epoch:

http://universe2.us/epoch.html

The developer is looking for beta testers, and knowing how many people on this forum get passionate about startup systems, I thought I'd toss this out as an alternative. Note that I've not tried it myself, and I don't know its developer personally, aside from that post. I just thought that some people here might be interested. The announcement I read advised using the git repository rather than the "Beta 1" download link.

Yamakuzure · Posted: Fri Nov 15, 2013 4:14 pm Post subject:

From the log on https://github.com/Subsentient/epoch it looks like the project is really active! Quite interesting...
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TomWij · Retired Dev Joined: 04 Jul 2012 Posts: 1553

Now available in the Portage tree as sys-apps/epoch!

Can boot it on my laptop, just having trouble to set up more difficult parts of a boot (eg. NetworkManager to get my WiFi up); I will probably use this on my Raspberry Pi.

depontius · Advocate Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 3509

Would someone who knows more care to compare Epoch to the SysV/OpenRC that Gentoo'ers are probably more familar with?

I don't know much of anything about bsd init, other than it exists. If it's a more valid comparison point I'd be curious to hear that, too.
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Anon-E-moose · Posted: Sat Dec 07, 2013 10:39 pm Post subject:

From the link in the first post

tranquilcool · Veteran Joined: 25 Mar 2005 Posts: 1179

TomWij · Retired Dev Joined: 04 Jul 2012 Posts: 1553

depontius · Advocate Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 3509

TomWij · Retired Dev Joined: 04 Jul 2012 Posts: 1553

Ah right, because the DHCP client does the "waiting for carrier" thing; I now see, I'll try that later.

Subsentient · n00b Joined: 09 Dec 2013 Posts: 2 Location: The blue void

Well, I use Epoch on all my systems because that's better for debugging since I have to maintain it, but I run git/master.
I also cannot get NetworkManager to run under the normal user, but I'm on Fedora on most machines which have their love for systemd which loves dbus.
You can start nm-applet as root and that works OK.
NetworkManager needs dbus, btw, so make sure dbus starts before NetworkManager.

@TomWij: Take a look at my current config file for some ideas. http://universe2.us/collector/epoch.conf

BTW: If you find bugs, please PM me, because RC1 was not as bug-free as I thought.

krinn · Watchman Joined: 02 May 2003 Posts: 7470

Subsentient:
This looks like a nice tools, alas, your faq is a stopper.

Q: I have a patch to contribute. Will you accept it?
Why should i adapt my system to epoch ; if it's to finally see its maintainer refuse patch from other and limit its grow speed / bugfixes / improvment?
It's also dangerous to put your bet on an init that is maintain by one person only, once he gets bored, he could drop the project without notice.

Q: Is the Epoch Init System compliant with the I.T.S.U.K.X 1932 UNIX standard
This mean epoch is like systemd, a regression.
It's not like one cannot make a program that is portable but still add some extensions only support by a system. Like if #ifdef doesn't exist...

So to me it looks like a hobby project, that could be of some use in embed linux system with a blur future. This is too limiting, specially for an init system.

I'm sure you takes fun making it, but as user, playing with init is not funny.
It might be interesting for systemd users, as at least the portability is no more in balance, but vs openrc or even sysv, it looks too tight.
With all great features it have, it kinda looks like a poisoned cake : omg it looks so nice, i want eat it : but i can't eat it.

Subsentient · n00b Joined: 09 Dec 2013 Posts: 2 Location: The blue void

@krinn: I suppose that honesty is best expressed by immediately writing a response without reviewing it, so you can take this seriously :^)

I tell people I'm not going to accept patches because once upon a time, I started a project. It was a fork of one of my favorite games. For months, it progressed, became excellent, and surpassed all my hopes. Then, I hit a bug I wasn't able to fix, because I'm no good at math. I enlisted the help of another. He accepted. Within two weeks, the codebase had been turned into a pile of semi-illegal unreadable trash so severe I had to reset the git branch to a month in the past to recover. I was unable to recover the project to it's former glory after that, and while it's still technically active, I don't know how I can fix this.

For this reason, I am incredibly wary of outside contributors. I will fix bugs that are reported to me and add features if I think they are a good idea, but I cannot guarantee I will implement YOUR version of the patch, and I really don't want to sound too friendly about patches, because that's exactly what ruined my last project.
Maybe I'm not thinking clearly and clinging to rage and fear, but there is a lot of it over what was done, and I don't want history to repeat itself.

As for Epoch being a hobbyist project, no. It's not a hobby. I've spent months on this project and put the rest of my life on hold because I believe that Epoch can be something very worthwhile, not only for me, but for the Linux world, if I handle things correctly. I won't abandon this project and I won't leave it to rot. If I don't have time for it I'll find someone who does. I've seen developers abandon useful projects before to everyone's detriment, the Tiny C Compiler being a prominent example that pissed me off, and I don't intend to follow in their selfish and negligent footsteps.

As far as standards go, they can hold you back. Severely. Systemd had some very good ideas and some good features, but their mistake was attempting to assimilate your system. It gets in the way, attempts to remove all alternatives to itself by eating core components, and is a disaster for small rescue/hobby distributions like ttylinux due to the fact they need to pull udev out of systemd's git, and the fact they need to increase the size of their kernel just to execute /sbin/init. Epoch won't do anything particularly stupid, but if a standard must be broken to add something worthwhile, and no true ill effects are visible, so be it. If it's just paper, oh well. If it's going to break something, I'll conform.

I hope that clarifies my intentions and thoughts.

-Subsentient

krinn · Watchman Joined: 02 May 2003 Posts: 7470

Thank you for your answers.

Zucca · Posted: Fri Mar 24, 2017 2:22 pm Post subject:

Let's bump this topic back up.

Has anyone been using epoch?
Does Gentoo provide service/init -files for epoch too? This table tells that it's supported. But does it only mean that it's in gentoo repository/overlay and nothing else?
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Ant P. · Watchman Joined: 18 Apr 2009 Posts: 6920

It's impossible to provide service files for this, because unlike every other service manager in existence it chose to lump everything into a single config file. There's a reason every other system daemon moved away from the "1000 lines, 1 ini file" model years ago...

John R. Graham · Posted: Fri Mar 24, 2017 8:59 pm Post subject:

From the web page:

Zucca · Posted: Sat Mar 25, 2017 8:06 am Post subject:

Maybe it's "ready". :P

Anyway. I kinda like the configuration minimalism. I would have maybe tested this, but creating configuration files to replace ~every /etc/init.d/* entry manually seems a bit too much on the systems I have currently up.
I could, however, try this out eventually on my Raspberry Pi...
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