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

[Emanuele Aina <emanuele.aina@collabora.com>]

The Wanderer wrote:

> [...] and the "proprietary"[0] interfaces they seem to
> use [...]
>
> [...]
>
> [0] Meaning approximately "we create our own language and talk it to
> ourselves, and anyone else who wants to talk to us has to learn our
> language", not intending to imply "undocumented" or "legally restricted"
> or anything of the sort. This isn't a very good term for what I mean,
> but I couldn't find a better one.

I tend to think that "custom interfaces" would be more appropriate for
what you described here.

The term "proprietary" seems to imply some sort of exclusivity with
regard to those interfaces, while my current impression is that systemd
developers do not have any interest in locking them to systemd: to the
contrary the seem quite happy that some of them got adopted by others
(hostnamed, localed, logind, etc.) and link to them from their wiki:

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/InterfacePortabilityAndStabilityChart/

In the case of logind, it has even been made able to run standalone to
let others reuse the same implementation, not only the interface.


Sorry for the digression, I just took the chance to mention this stuff
here since it's not the first time I see this term used somewhat
inappropriately in this context.

-- 
Emanuele Aina
http://www.collabora.com