Re: GNOME 3.4 will rely on hostnamed, localed, timedated D-Bus API

[Bastien Nocera <bnocera redhat com>]

On Fri, 2012-01-27 at 00:56 +0100, Olav Vitters wrote:
> GNOME 3.2 contains code to change:
>  - system hostname
>  - date & time settings (time, timezone, etc)
>  - system locale
> 
> As there is no standard across distributions, GNOME detected the
> distribution and for a few distributions, was able to change above
> settings.
> 
> Starting with GNOME 3.4, GNOME will rely on the following D-Bus APIs
> provided by the following daemons:
>  - hostnamed
>  - localed
>  - timedated
> 
> These daemons are included in the systemd tarball. For the D-Bus API
> reference, see the links at the end of this email.

Not quite. The hostnamed and localed requirements haven't changed from
3.2.

If you have hostnamed, you can change the "computer's nice name" which
in turn changes the hostname. If you have localed, you can apply your
language, keyboard and format settings system-wide.

If the daemon isn't there, the functionality is disabled.

> Recommendation:
>  - systemd only systems: ensure these daemons are packaged and running
>  - systemd+sysvinit systems: put these daemons in a separate package and
>    ensure they are running under both init systems. They do not rely on
>    a running systemd.
>  - other init systems: Please write a _new_ daemon to provide this
>    functionality. The D-Bus API is really simple and instead of patching
>    hostnamed/locald/timedated to support other distributions/init
>    systemd, the recommendation is to just write a new daemon which
>    implements the D-Bus API.
>    Alternatively, (if these daemons do not need to be patched) only
>    compile and package the hostnamed, localed and timedated from the
>    systemd tarball.
> 
> Note: Ubuntu has written a daemon implementing the hostnamed and localed
> D-Bus interfaces.
> 
> Reference:
>  - http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/InterfacePortabilityAndStabilityChart
>  - http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/hostnamed
>  - http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/localed
>  - http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/timedated
>  - https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=658352
>