Re: [gentoo-dev] Installing systemd units with gx86 packages

["Canek Peláez Valdés" <caneko@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Apr 24, 2011 at 4:35 PM, William Hubbs <williamh@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 24, 2011 at 09:36:30AM +0200, Michał Górny wrote:
>> Fellow devs,
>>
>> I've started working on bringing systemd to Gentoo [1] lately,
>> and I think it is important to raise the aspect of systemd unit
>> inclusion in various packages in gx86 ASAP.
>>
>> The number of packages coming with systemd units is growing rapidly
>> recently, and that especially applies to freedesktop packages.
>> One side effect of that is that these packages treat systemd
>> as an automagic dependency, installing systemd units whenever its
>> pkgconfig file is installed. I already opened two bugs on that [2,3]
>> but there would be much more...
>
> I think the better way to handle this will be to patch the build systems
> to not make this an automagic dependency and send those patches
> upstream.
>
> http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/qa/automagic.xml
>
> I'm not a member of qa, but I agree with this position on automagic
> dependencies.

I'm speaking as a simple user, but I don't think the systemd unit
files qualify as automagic dependencies as described by the QA
document. In the first place, as Michael pointed out, we can disable
them with --without-systemdsystemunitdir, so there is no magic at all.
In the second place, the usual Gentoo way of enabling OpenRC services
is to *add* init.d scripts in the ebuild, and this is completely
orthogonal to a package installing a systemd unit file (the presence
of the later does not matter to OpenRC at all). And finally, the idea
of systemd is to be a completely distro-agnostic init system, without
the  multiple failures of SysV, and without the one-company-rule of
Upstart; this seems to be actually working, hence a lot of downstream
packages are willing (and eager) to ship systemd unit files. The init
scripts belong to the packages, they know best how the
service/whatever needs to be run.

I'm using Gentoo+systemd since a couple of months, and it works
incredible well. And I really like the idea of freeing the rather
precious Gentoo-developers time off of writing init scripts.

Just my 0.02 ${CURRENCY/100}.


> William

-- 
Canek Peláez Valdés
Posgrado en Ciencia e Ingeniería de la Computación
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México