Dependency-based & Event-based init daemons and launchd

"With the recent announcement of systemd, I've noticed some increased confusion around Upstart and what it means to be an event-based init daemon. Now seems as good a time as any to try and clear that up by describing what I mean by that.

"Dependency-based init

"Before Upstart came along, the state of the art of init daemon replacements were the dependency-based init daemons. The two most well-known at the time was the Service Management Facility (SMF) of Solaris, and initng on Linux.

"The easiest way to understand how a dependency-based init daemon works is to look at another dependency-based system you're probably more familiar with: the package manager of your Linux distribution."

Complete Story

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