Hi, On 7/10/24 05:36, Marco d'Itri wrote:
That's my question, essentially: is this an interface with full support from upstream, or something that may change in an incompatible way later that will require us to deploy additional infrastructure to support?
Multiple people, one of the systemd upstream maintainers among them, already told you that creating configuration files is a normal and fully supported interface.
It is supported *now*, but the roadmap is unclear -- that support could be discontinued at any moment, and it would not be the first time a feature Debian relied on was removed.
The key feature of both sysvinit and ifupdown, from Debian's perspective, has always been control: with sysvinit, there were no "upstream" definitions, it was all defined by us as part of Debian Policy, and if we
What you mean is that it has always been that they were basically abandoned upstream so there were no new features were coming that way and we had to implement in Debian everything that we needed.
If you want to ignore my point, sure, why not.The thing is, we are a volunteer project. We cannot afford to be in perpetual firefighting mode, because none of us is paid well enough for that. We are still wiping up the technical debt of the usrmerge transition, which binds additional resources.
I'm not saying this change is bad. I'm saying we need to ensure that this time we have the necessary manpower with enough motivation and available time to treat this as an ongoing commitment to actually maintain and support this after the initial implementation, and the first step is to estimate the amount of effort required, which is largely dependent on upstream commitment to *long term* interface stability.
I understand that progress in Debian being slow is frustrating, but forcing progress in the form of practical necessities arising out of previous decisions and calling for volunteers whenever change must be implemented is not a sustainable project steering method.
The initial implementation is easy, and I have no doubt this can be done within weeks. However unlike ifupdown, which at least continues to work if no one changes it (which is perfect for a volunteer project), this has a factor that is outside Debian's control.
Basically, if a newer version of systemd-networkd breaks the interface d-i used, can we get a process in place to
1. detect that this is a breaking change 2. hold off on deploying the new version until d-i has been updated 3. find a volunteer quickly to implement the required adaptation?Of course, with a long-term support commitment from upstream we can significantly reduce the effort required for this process.
Simon
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