Re: Integration with systemd
Simon Richter writes:
> On Wed, Oct 30, 2019 at 05:17:57PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
>
>> One can individually say that one doesn't care about those features, but
>> we just cannot say Debian as a whole should not care about those features.
>> It doesn't work. We have to take an affirmative stance on what Debian is
>> going to do with software that does care about and use those features;
>> whether we're committing to porting it, whether we're going to kick it out
>> of the archive (that seems highly unlikely to be viable), whether we're
>> going to say that software with a hard dependency on systemd features is
>> allowed to only work on systems running systemd, or some other
>> alternative.
>
> From an integration point of view we need to make sure that software that
> is installed also works, and I have little trouble when packages declare an
> explicit dependency on systemd running as pid 1.
Such a dependency doesn't work well with services installed in
containers which can still access stuff outside the container.
Or services started by a user (who doesn't have to use the provided
system integration).
> They need to declare a
> dependency nonetheless, because init systems have never been Essential, and
> also because the dependency likely needs a minimum version.
No: init systems have been essential until systemd (or init) replaced
sysvinit.
Note that there are other cases where we don't have explicit
dependencies such as depending on the Linux kernel itself, even though
some programs require minimum versions (including glibc).
> However, a lot of our software comes from the BSD world and will never
> fully switch to systemd, and that software is often used in server contexts
> by people who know exactly what they are doing. I don't see why we
> shouldn't support these people anymore, especially as they are the ones who
> cannot be served equally well by other distributions.
Sure, you can just not install any init system. This doesn't require
Debian to support other init systems and provide integration with them.
> Infrastructure I'd like to see is
>
> - dh_systemd generating a versioned dependency for the unit files
> given
That makes supporting other init systems even less possible as
everything shipping any systemd service will start to pull in systemd,
even though one might not use it to start the service.
I think this is not a good idea.
> - apt being able to blacklist packages and hide packages that depend on
> those
Implicitly hiding some packages seems very confusing.
Ansgar
Reply to: