Let's build a new service manager for Alpine! | Ariadne's Space
Update (April 27): Please visit Laurent’s website on this issue for a more detailed proposal. If you work at a company which has budget for this, please get in touch with him directly.
As many of you already know, Alpine presently uses an fairly modified version of OpenRC as its service manager. Unfortunately, OpenRC maintenance has stagnated: the last release was over a year ago.
We feel now is a good time to start working on a replacement service manager based on user feedback and design discussions we’ve had over the past few years which can be simply summarized as systemd done right. But what does systemd done right mean?
Our plan is to build a supervision-first service manager that consumes and reacts to events, using declarative unit files similar to systemd, so that administrators who are familiar with systemd can easily learn the new system. In order to build this system, we plan to work with Laurent Bercot, a globally recognized domain expert on process supervision systems and author of the s6 software supervision suite.
This work will also build on the work we’ve done with ifupdown-ng, as ifupdown-ng will be able to reflect its own state into the service manager allowing it to start services or stop them as the network state changes. OpenRC does not support reacting to arbitrary events, which is why this functionality is not yet available.
