Re: [gentoo-dev] Making systemd more accessible to "normal" users

[Mike Gilbert <floppym@gentoo.org>]

On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 11:49 AM, Ben de Groot <yngwin@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On 8 May 2013 23:39, Fabio Erculiani <lxnay@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 5:26 PM, Ben de Groot <yngwin@gentoo.org> wrote:
>>> On 1 May 2013 18:04, Fabio Erculiani <lxnay@gentoo.org> wrote:
>>>> It looks like there is some consensus on the effort of making systemd
>>>> more accessible, while there are problems with submitting bugs about
>>>> new systemd units of the sort that maintainers just_dont_answer(tm).
>>>> In this case, I am just giving 3 weeks grace period for maintainers to
>>>> answer and then I usually go ahead adding units (I'm in systemd@ after
>>>> all).
>>>
>>> In my opinion you should not be asking maintainers to add systemd
>>> units to their packages. They most likely do not have systems on which
>>> they can test these, and very few users would need them anyway. I
>>
>>> would think it is better to add them to a separate systemd-units
>>> package.
>>
>> This sounds really wrong (tm) to me. It took me two weeks to kill that
>> silly systemd-units pkg.
>> All the distros around here do install systemd units with their
>> packages and I believe that the council has already spoken about this.
>
> It sounds more wrong to me to be asking normal package maintainers to
> test and maintain unit files, while they don't use systemd themselves,
> nor have it installed. Nor would most of our users need this.

I don't think we are actually asking you to test/maintain them; you
can treat them as a request for permission to perform a non-maintainer
commit.

If users run into problems, please feel free to copy/assign us on bugs.

> And I believe the council has only spoken out against using a useflag
> for installing such files. Afaik they haven't spoken out against a
> systemd-units package. Please refer me to their decision if I'm wrong.
>

Having a package to install every systemd unit in existence just
clutters the end user's system and makes it harder to tell which units
are actually valid.

Also, if a unit needs to be updated between versions of a given
package, that will lead to some strange looking deps.

A potential alternative would be to have a separate systemd-unit
package for each package in the tree, but that just seems like
overkill to me for a set of very small text files. And it still means
adding an optional runtime dep to the relevent packages.