Re: Survey answers part 3: systemd is not portable and what this means for our ports

[Ondřej Surý <ondrej@sury.org>]

On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 2:28 PM, The Wanderer <wanderer@fastmail.fm> wrote:

My concern was that the integrated nature of it would make it harder to

replace any one part, especially if desiring to extend rather than just
reimplement. Having it made clear that it's more compatible with being
split out "piecemeal", as you put it - with being essentially modular -
than I'd thought does help somewhat in that regard, however.

We have a *zillion* libraries where we are *locked-in*. Just a few examples:

1. there's one big lock-in called dpkg :)

2. try to get rid of OpenSSL

3. we cannot use GTK+ for KDE and QT for Gnome - also a lock-in

4. just do dpkg --get-selections and see yourself

I don't see a single reason why the modern sysvinit case should be any special.

Yes, change is hard, but one should not resist the change just because it's a change.

Few side notes:

1. As far as I have noticed - systemd is well documented, modular and have documented interfaces between modules.

2. The syntax of any declarative init files is and will be simple enough to write a conversion script. That's not possible to do with sysvinit shell scripts. Thus any possible future change will be *easier* and not harder that this step.

O.

--
Ondřej Surý <ondrej@sury.org>