Re: systemd as external dependency

[Lennart Poettering <mztabzr 0pointer de>]

On Wed, 18.05.11 16:53, Josselin Mouette (joss debian org) wrote:

> Le mercredi 18 mai 2011 à 15:47 +0100, Alberto Ruiz a écrit : 
> > Resources are scarce, and I'm afraid that Sun/Oracle  (and I'm talking
> > as an ex-Sun that worked closely with the Solaris Desktop guys here)
> > or any other group that cares about GNOME in other platforms can't
> > expect that the GNOME community should carry the burden of cross
> > platform support itself.
> 
> Nobody has ever asked the GNOME community to do that. Actually, nobody
> even asked the Debian GNOME team to do that for non-Linux ports. But we
> could always integrate the necessary patches to support BSD (and even
> Hurd!) when people wrote them.
> 
> For systemd this is another story, since Lennart always made it very
> clear that a port to another OS would have to live in another
> repository. Telling people to do the porting job is one thing, telling
> them to maintain a complete fork is another one.

Again, I think the mode of cooperation here should not be that
systemd/Linux and the other kernels share code here. Instead it should
be to share interfaces. For example, in regards of the
hostname/time/locale mechanisms reimplement the bus interface, it's well
documented.

It's free software, you can always start on our codebase, but in the end
I don't think it makes sense for me to support the porting work in my
upstream repo. I also doubt it even makes sense to port that
stuff. Also, never forget that while me might be able to pull it off to
use systemd as vehicle to standardize certain configuration files on
Linux I have serious doubts we could do that on the other
kernels. I.e. if we say /etc/locale.conf should be the only place to set
locale settings then I have serious doubts the BSD or Solaris folks
would be so keen on that.

Also note that those other archs need very different code anyway. For
example, Solaris isn't too much into PK. Our mechanisms use PK. Hence
they'd have to do non-trivial porting work anyway. And given how trivial
the locale code actually is there's really no point in porting it
over. Rewriting isn't so difficult.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.