Re: systemd as external dependency

[Lennart Poettering <mztabzr 0pointer de>]

On Wed, 18.05.11 14:46, Federico Mena Quintero (federico ximian com) wrote:

> There are *probably* hit-and-run services like "set the hostname" where
> D-Bus activation could launch a tiny helper process that changes the
> hostname and emits a signal, and dies quickly.  These present no
> problem, except for how to ship them.

hostnamed is a tiny bus activated service. It normally isn't running
unless somebody is using it, i.e. is actually changing the hostname.

> There are *probably* services that need to be running constantly, but I
> can't think of one right now.  Those need a daemon.  I'm kind of unhappy
> of the proliferation of daemons that we had at one point -
> gnome-session, the user's D-Bus daemon, gnome-settings-daemon, etc.
> Maybe if we had One Standard Way of loading service-y things into a
> central daemon, we could save a little memory and context switches?  Is
> this even worthwhile?  (If one crashes, it would make things much
> worse...).

I think the best way to save resources is not to run anything. For stuff
like hostnames/locale/time which is used only every other moonphase
having tiny single-purpose mini-services is perfectly appropriate. I
don't think there would be any benefit in merging these mini daemons
into one. Au contraire, I'd guess you'd waste even more resources with
dlopen() and friends.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.