Hello world, Dmitry Smirnov <[email protected]> Tue, 14 Jul 2020 18:04:45 +1000: > Not yet, unfortunately. Sorry for inconvenience. I'm going to seek > CTTE advise on #959174...
I am joining the conversation as an individual (so I'm not wearing any
tech-ctte hat yet), prompted by this. Do note that this has _not yet_
happened; we only got this notice on IRC around a week ago:
dear ctte, I'm not sure whether #959828 has been referred to you
already. in case that happens: I've started an attempt at
mediating and I would be interested in helping on this matter.
I took a quick read of the bug (please don't expect me to have grasped
the details of the issue), and my initial thoughts are:
- Systemd _does_ provide an amazing amount of core system facilities
under a same package, some of which are prone to be reimplemented
for $reasons.
- There are many important system aspects that systemctl does not, and
will not, attempt to cover. Systemd ship 36 executable binaries,
systemctl ships only one.
→ Hence, I believe systemctl's statement «Provides: systemd» cannot
be taken as descriptive enough. At least two breakage cases have
been presented, and I'm sure many more will follow
- The current situation does not allow systemctl to be at all useful
in a generalizable way. This is, of course, source of frustration to
many people feeling systemctl to be a good enough (or better)
alternative for their specific use case - And there are several such
use cases documented; containers are probably the easiest example.
Maybe we could improve on the problem putting it upside down: What if
systemd stated "Provides:" for their main interfaces? While not every
provided binary would qualify as a "main interface", I think a line
such as:
Provides: journalctl, loginctl, systemctl
would make sense for systemd. Other scripts could depend on the
specific functionality they make use of.
Probably, the systemctl package would require a rename to
'docker-systemctl' or something like that (the upstream name is
'docker systemctl replacement').
What is the systemd maintainers view of this idea? And the
systemctl's?
Greetings,
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