Proposal for systemd interface reliance

[Olav Vitters <olav vitters nl>]

The other announcement. Related to systemd, but not the same.

I am right that hostnamed, localed and timedated do not rely on systemd
to be running right?

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

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.

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.

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

-- 
Regards,
Olav