Re: [gentoo-dev] Questions about SystemD and OpenRC

["Olivier Crête" <tester@gentoo.org>]

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Hi,

Let's cut the FUD.

On Tue, 2012-08-07 at 08:47 -0400, Sylvain Alain wrote:
> 1. The SystemD and Udev projetcs are merged now, so what is the impact
> on the Gentoo on a short term period ?

Only the build system is merged, they're still separate binaries.

> 2. I saw on some lists that Gnome/Kde and Xfce plan to use some
> SystemD API, so does it means that we will need to install SystemD
> aside of OpenRC ? 


The APIs that GNOME is using from systemd are simple, well designed and
well documented D-Bus APIs [1][2][3]. They are implemented by simple
binaries separate from the core systemd. Legacy init systems can just
re-use them as-is.

Also, systemd includes logind, which replaces ConsoleKit with a much
better design.

> 4. Finally, is there any reason why Gnome/Kde/Xfce wants to add deps
related to SystemD ? I don't understand why these desktops want to
depend on a specific Sysint....

Old versions of GNOME (and KDE, XFCE, etc) had to have distro-specific
code for a bunch of things, such as changing the timezone, the system
locale or the hostname. Because these things are in separate places in
every distribution for historical reason. So every desktop had to
re-implement these things for every distribution, making a lot of
duplicated code. The goal is to have a single set of tools using a
common D-Bus API that you only have to implement once per distribution
and that every desktop can use.

> 3. In a long term vision, can OpenRC still exist on a Gentoo
> box(OpenRC might be able to boot the box then give the control to
> SystemD/Udev for the rest of the boot process)  or we will need to
> migrate to SystemD to be able to use Gnome/Kde or Xfce ?

I expect that in the not so long term, systemd will become an essential
user-space component of desktop Linux, just like crond, syslog, dbus,
udev or glibc. Sharing that code just makes sense, that allows
distributions to focus on their strength instead of having to maintain a
nightmare of shell scripts. Sure you can do a Android and write your own
crappier version, but that doesn't gain you anything.

Refs:
[1] http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/hostnamed
[2] http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/timedated
[3] http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/localed
[4] http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/logind

-- 
Olivier Crête
tester@gentoo.org
Gentoo Developer

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