POLL RESULTS: what installations would you use process supervision in?

From: Avery Payne <avery.p.payne_at_gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 01 Apr 2015 19:56:23 -0700

There were 8 respondents.

[ 4 ] A hand-made / hand-customized Linux installation

[ 1 ] A commercial installation (HP-UX, AIX, Pre-Oracle Solaris)

[ 2 ] an installation made with LFS

[ 2 ] an installation made with Gentoo

[ 0 ] an installation made with Arch

[ 3 ] an installation made with Debian / Ubuntu

[ 2 ] an installation made with Fedora / Red Hat

[ 4 ] an installation made with NetBSD/OpenBSD/FreeBSD

[ 1 ] an installation made with DragonflyBSD

[ 0 ] an installation made with Android Open Source Project

[ 4 ] an installation not listed here (please give name and/or details)
for this category, responses are broken down as:
+ 1 condensed summary: runit within a larger project that uses Docker
+ 1 "Illumos-derived distros (e.g. SmartOS, OmniOS)"
+ 1 "Docker Images, Using Gorka's s6-overlay"
+ 1 "Ubuntu and Alpine Linux, but both inside docker :-)"

Method:
An open invitation to the supervision mailing list, with multiple choice
responses being sent to my email address. Responses were tallied on
April 1 (no joke). Each respondent is allowed +1 vote for a category,
although multiple categories are allowed.

Summary:
The poll was meant to provide a broad picture of how process supervision
is used by platform, and give a general feeling to how people are using
it. Even with just 8 respondents, this is informative. From this, some
(personally biased) observations:

* Docker, which is not an OS but a container solution, has a surprising
amount of interest. I haven't had time to play with Docker yet so I can
only guess as to why - perhaps the low overhead and/or storage
requirements that come with this model lend to making for "slim" containers?

* People have a very keen interest in using supervision with *BSD, with
4 responders using it in some fashion. Perhaps some "outreach" to those
communities is in order...

* I was surprised to see Fedora/Red Hat listed, as these are
traditionally systemd based, and systemd provides a superset of process
supervision features.

* Some of the design decisions in my project came from the idea that the
definition directories should be as portable as possible, because
process supervision is a concept that extends to a large number of
systems, and not just "the one". As a result of that decision,
development has been very slow and deliberate, probably slower than I
would like. Because I'm seeing a strong showing by non-Linux systems, I
think it hints strongly that this was the right decision to make.

A big "Thank You" to everyone for your time, votes, and comments.
Received on Thu Apr 02 2015 - 02:56:23 UTC