Laurent Bercot <ska-de...@skarnet.org> writes:
[...]
>> I think I speak for most people here when I say we dislike
>> the quantity of undocumented daemons running
>> on on gnu/Linux desktop nowadays and
>> I hope we can trim that down with Devuan
>
> The real sticking point in what you just wrote is "undocumented".
> I think most people wouldn't mind a pandemonium on their machine IF
> they knew exactly what daemon is doing what, how many resources a
> daemon consumes, and how to disable the ones they don't need.
I beg to differ here. Assuming the following little program:
--------
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
int main(void)
{
while (1) {
if (fork() != 0) exit(0);
sleep(2);
}
return 0;
}
--------
If this is running on some system, it will keep a purposeless process
available in a process listing which is somewhat difficult to kill. It
consumes basically no resources, however, and it could be documented as
avalo
This daemon reproduces itself in a controlled way, consuming
minimal resources. Keep one around and you'll never have to feel
alone in the wilderness.
Most people probably wouldn't care for something like this if it got
installed as side-effect of installing some package they wanted to use
and if the system started it automatically because the cost of getting
rid of it is much higher than any real damage it does. Should they
notice it, they'd probably have a short moment of "Incompetent
fuckers. They simply can't do this without an ever-increasing amount of
processes with silly names whose purpose I don't really understand!" and
then forget about it without ever bothering to look for corresponding
documentation, let alone read it.
But that's not a good reason for it being installed and running: A
daemon process should only exist because it provides some important
functionality with a real benefit for users of the system which cannot
(reasonably) be provided in some other way, eg, by starting a program to
perform a certain task on demand. Eg, there should be no daemon running
permanently to monitor device creation events which never happen in
order to create device nodes for hardware which was detected on boot and
won't go away while the system is up. And it also shouldn't be running
because every other millenium (as seen from the perspective of the
computer), someone changes the configuration of the USB(-lan): This can
perfectly well be handled with on-demand execution (and hadn't udev
eaten hotplug, I certainly wouldn't be running it).
_______________________________________________
Dng mailing list
Dng@lists.dyne.org
https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
