On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 12:36 PM, Paul Varner <fuzzy...@gentoo.org> wrote: > On 2/9/16 7:44 AM, Rich Freeman wrote: >> >> I thought the whole beauty of unix was the everything-is-a-file design? > > No, the beauty of Unix has always been the architectural philosophy of > loose-coupling of the components of the system. > The "everything is a file" is a result of that philosophy. The end result > of this is that you can switch out components of the system without > redesigning other aspects of the system. That is the philosophy that allows > Gentoo to exist as meta-distribution and to provide choice for what you > want.
While I agree with much of that, keep in mind that strictly avoiding loose coupling is a decision that actually denies some choices. Strong coupling between my service manager and cron implementation means that I can set one configuration option and have it apply to everything, or have a common syntax across them. Having it all tie into kdbus means a simpler interface design for all of it. I think this can be carried too far, and I don't use the full systemd family for everything I do. However, when I find that it makes sense to use various systemd components together there are a lot of benefits from the tight coupling. And we already accept this in other parts of the system, the kernel being the most obvious. You can't use one implementation of /proc and a different implementation of /sys, and use zfs from FreeBSD seamlessly on the same system (I'm not saying you can't port all of those into the same codebase - just as you could probably port eudev into systemd if you wanted to fork them both). My point was that providing common interfaces to system services was actually a big part of the unix appeal. It hasn't fully kept up, and I think somebody already mentioned Plan 9 in the thread. I'm not really sure I want my window manager to be part of the kernel, even if it is a microkernel, and there will always be another layer of abstraction. But, the goal is still a good one, and of course with Gentoo you have the choice not to use it (though it may become a harder one to sustain if some of the various upstreams wither away) -- Rich
