systemd for developers

Slides for earlier version of talk: http://she-devel.com/systemd_talk.odp

The controversial systemd has absorbed udev and purported to replace syslog with the journal daemon. The recent decisions by Debian and Ubuntu to adopt systemd assure its imminent dominance as a Linux init system. Users and sysadmins are predictably horrified. 

In fact systemd is winning wide acceptance because it is simpler, easier to use, and better documented than its competition. Systemd is modular in design since it is composed of dozens of unit files written in ASCII in a declarative style.   Systemd's underlying philosophy is to reduce code duplication and improve quality by removing functionality from sysVinit scripts and moving it to the kernel or the systemd core.  Systemd provides many intuitive administrative tools.   A large development community is rapidly adding new features.

I'll describe how to get started with systemd tools and application development, discuss some novel features and some problems, and llustrate many points with simple demos.