...Not having any particular stake in this argument, are we quite sure that's Tyrell's intended meaning, something so mundane? I think Tyrell is more taking about stuff like this:
I have seen things you people wouldn't believe Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like [small cough] tears in rain. Time to die
...i.e., Roy's greatness and accomplishment as a person. At that point, Tyrell wants to sooth Roy and make him accept his place by calling him amazing. Simply saying "well, that's the cost of bein' so darn strong" conflicts with his next line: "And you have burned so very, very brightly, Roy."
For me, it's keyscript in crypttab which completely stopped my systems from booting. They're not keen to ever implement becase apparently shell scripts are intrinsically racy (for what it's worth my own keyscripts have a 10s timeout and fall-back to askpass if the crpyt token doesn't become available. I've never had one of my servers reach this time-out, the hardware config rarely ever changes). I wrote about some of the infinite permutations possible to support the use-case of just having a 4-line shell script, but it just seems that systemd is religiously opposed to shell scripts. Eventually, someone pointed out that I could pass keyscript args in the kernel boot parameters which seems to be a partially satisfactory solution for now.
For what it's worth, I do like the declarative nature of systemd for starting processes, socket activation etc. and I have migrated most of my stuff to systemd. It bothers me that debugging dependency issues is still so hard (ever tried "systemd-analyze dot"? the output is completely worthless as a debugging aid). Still, I am uneasy about the dogmatic anti-shellscript religion, I worry about the project's overall approach to security when simply accidentally running systemctl as a non-root user causes it to segfault, and it doesn't seem right that a change in pid1 should even remotely impact userland applications at all, let alone as deeply as systemd has.
At the end of the day, choice of default init system isn't going to make me switch from my favourite distro of the last 14 years (apart from a 2 year excursion to Ubuntu), but I think some of my own hostility toward systemd has been a result of the instantly dismissive remarks whenever I've tried to explain a problem I've had with it - by now I'm realizing that perhaps everybody is just too tired to tell the difference between a valid systemd complaint and yet another "get off my lawn" argument. In any case it's made me realize I should really diversify my tastes a little, currently playing with FreeBSD (again) and NixOS - that has to be a good thing.
I think he means that it's trivial in Gentoo to run arbitrary versions of any old library or dependency for the sake of a given application that is stuck in the past, not just package-pinning as we do in Debian-land. For example, I have an old gnuradio application that was written for gnuradio 3.6.x, but this was never shipped in any official release of Debian (it went gnuradio 3.5 in wheezy -> gnuradio 3.7 in jessie).
In gentoo it's trivial to have a specific old version of libfoo (and all the old, terribly specific versions of its huge pile of dependencies) installed along-side whatever passes for the current version of libfoo for the rest of your applications which aren't stuck in the past.
In Debian I had to re-build gnuradio from the 3.6 source, with much tweaking of the debian/control, debian/rules files and wading through debian-specific patchsets intended for gnuradio 3.5 or gnuradio 3.7, that don't apply to gnuradio 3.6. And all its dependencies. And suffer the fact that now all of the rest of my applications are forced to use gnuradio 3.6.
Other than being forced to type in 12 passphrases manually to decrypt each hard disk at every single goddamn boot, because custom keyscripts just "aren't the systemd way". Or spending hours figuring out why your Requires=network.target units inexplicably never start on boot, without a single shred of clue or evidence or event in any logs whatsoever, despite LogLevel=Debug and even though network.target clearly flashes by during boot and systemd-analyze clearly shows that it knows about this relationship with your unit and the service starts normally when you login and systemctl start manually. Or that tweaking your daemon args now requires a systemd daemon-reload as well as restart.
Yes, apart from all that, and the time saved now that admins will never have to see another freaky, alien shell script ever again because init systems were the only thing which used them, apart from all that... I'm hoping like hell systemd will hopefully one day buy me something other than more downtime.
HOLY MACRO!