Just one week after its formal declaration of independence, the Republic of systemd has already met opposition from rival nation Emacs over territorial disputes.

“Yeah about independenced. It turns out there’s already an Emacs keybinding for that”, said Ed Best, a spokesman for President-for-life Saint Ignutius. “Control x Meta d Meta i. You then supply your own constitution in Emacs Lisp.”

independenced is a systemd service that provides citizenship for users and programs. The systemd project had been planning its release for several months, but was frequently delayed by technical issues. By contrast, the Emacs declare-independence package had already been out on the ELPA repositories for years, despite nobody noticing.

“It’s an aggressive move. systemd is feature creeping into territory that we’ve feature creeped into before. We won’t stand for this”, said Ed.

The systemd side disagrees, with lead developer Lennart Poettering claiming “ancestral domain” over “classically Unix daemon territories”. “If you want an example of an aggressive nation, look no further than Emacs. Just how many foreign embedded Emacs editors are there?”

Poettering was referring to the fact that Emacs has strategic embeddings in bash, GRUB, info, and other utilities.

Rising tensions between the two nations have soured systemd’s first week of sovereignty, with countries and distros being cautious over which side to support. That has not affected the budding republic’s resolve to claim the said territories, however.

“It’s not feature creep if your primary feature is ‘to run stuff for reasons’. We won’t back down.”