The doc says it's equivalent to sinit: suckless init. That led to a git site I don't understand cuz I don't know git. I downloaded the zip to see if readme had anything. Here's what it says:
"sinit is a simple init. It was initially based on
Rich Felker's minimal init. Why? I wanted to get rid of Busybox init on my toy distro. How? There are 3 signals that sinit will act on.
SIGUSR1: powers off the machine.
SIGINT: reboots the machine (or alternatively via ctrl-alt-del).
SIGCHLD: reap children"
So, one or more of these could use some better documentation. Or at least more accessible for non-Git users.
EDIT to Add: I like the idea of rewriting key stuff like this in safer, easier-to-maintain languages like Ocaml. Really nice stuff there. Past that, I can't derive the value proposition without a page detailing what it does vs alternatives.
You read the readme, but did you read the code? You may be surprised at just how simple and straightforward it is. I'm not quite sure that this OCaml (or indeed the suckless) init implementation's intrinsic value depends upon the author conducting a survey of existing alternatives.
I knew someone would say that haha. Let's rephrase what you said in a general context to show what the problem is:
"Anytime you're evaluating solutions to a specific problem in your system or code you should look at all the source code people are posting without expecting a description of what it does. Just read all the source code out there, guess if it meets your needs, and then try whichever looks right."
Kind of dumb way to go about finding 3rd party libraries or tools. Similarly foolish to expect it unless one simply doesn't care about adoption at all. The alternative, which my comment promotes, is to have relevant data in a short summary on each projects' page. Google, HN, or whatever finds users/developers a set of pages like this. At a glance, they can tell what's worth further investigation. Then, they look at its code. Much better way to use limited time to find needles in the massive haystack that is the Web.
I get where you're coming from, but the entire tarball contains one source code file and it's a paltry 89 lines in 1317 bytes. Heck, the man page is a whole 70 bytes bigger than the source code. This is very, very different from, say, Django. I'm not advocating for... whatever it is you're claiming w.r.t. needles and haystacks, only a wee bit of situational awareness when you've already gone so far as to download the code.
And Suckless? Yeah, they're basically the definition of "doesn't care about adoption at all".
"Heck, the man page is a whole 70 bytes bigger than the source code. This is very, very different from, say, Django. I'm not advocating for... "
Alright, alright haha. Yeah, I did download the code. It was small and seemed understandable. Seemed as there's no telling what assumptions its built against. I've seen code meant to prevent compiler issues, OS issues, timing channels... all sorts of things you wouldn't know just reading the code itself & might have even scrapped. So, I'm still about code coming with a detailed statement of what it does with what environmental assumptions.
On other hand, this could be so plain that the environment or tools don't matter. Maybe.
"And Suckless? Yeah, they're basically the definition of "doesn't care about adoption at all"."
Their page hints at targeting a demographic of pro's tired of bloated BS. I wasn't sure how much they cared. There's some clarification.
I wouldn't say you should read all source code out there; but this is just 89 lines of fairly readable C code. Even its man page (the .8 file) is larger!
No doubt. That reminds me: what are the easiest, down-to-earth articles any of you know of on the topic for beginners. Both Git and Github since I clearly will have to learn both.
"sinit is a simple init. It was initially based on Rich Felker's minimal init. Why? I wanted to get rid of Busybox init on my toy distro. How? There are 3 signals that sinit will act on.
SIGUSR1: powers off the machine. SIGINT: reboots the machine (or alternatively via ctrl-alt-del). SIGCHLD: reap children"
So, one or more of these could use some better documentation. Or at least more accessible for non-Git users.
EDIT to Add: I like the idea of rewriting key stuff like this in safer, easier-to-maintain languages like Ocaml. Really nice stuff there. Past that, I can't derive the value proposition without a page detailing what it does vs alternatives.