GNU Shepherd as a service manager for both system and user services that is used by Guix and relying on Guile Scheme has finally reached version 1.0. For those not pleased with systemd, GNU Shepherd can be used as an init system and now has finally crossed the version 1.0 milestone after 21 years of development.

The GNU Shepherd developers believe the Shepherd 1.0.0 release marks " a solid tool, meeting the kind of user experience one has come to expect since systemd. "

With GNU Shepherd 1.0 there is now the ability to run herd status SERVICE for conveniently seeing the status of a given service with more information than prior versions. The herd status sub-command will also now show recently logged messages and log files. Another herd status improvement is the herd status root for showing more information about the root service itself.

GNU Shepherd 1.0 also adds support for timed services with the new "make-timer-constructor" procedure to define a service that runs periodically on a timed basis.

Some of the other new features with GNU Shepherd 1.0 include a new log rotation service, a new system log service, a new timer service, a new transient service maker, Linux kexec support, the shepherd command now honoring the "--silent" argument, GOOPS programming interface support, and the source tarball is now deemed reproducible.

From the [1]GNU.org project site , here is an example of a Guile Scheme based service file for GNU Shepherd.

Downloads and more details on today's GNU Shepherd 1.0 release via [2]the info-gnu mailing list .



[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/shepherd/

[2] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2024-12/msg00003.html