[systemd-devel] [packaging] split of systemd package

[Martin Pitt]

Hello all,

in case it's useful, this is how we split them in Debian.

However, is this even a topic for upstream, apart from giving
recommendations? I. e. do you actually consider putting this kind of
split into the upstream build system à la "make install-<component>"?

Lukáš Nykrýn [2015-11-11 11:47 +0100]:
> Personally I don't think it makes sense to split the package to get a
> smaller core package. Most of our binaries are just few KBs.

They are actually fairly big, 100 kB to 1.5 MB for systemd itself. I
think the main reason for that is that they all statically link
libsystemd instead of dynamically linking to libsystemd.so.0. Is there
a particular reason for that?

> Other aspect would be minimizing external dependencies.

That is one important reason why we split them in Debian; e. g. the
machined/nspawn/importd group pulls in a number of rather heavy
dependencies. udev (including hwdb) is something which you don't need
in containers, so we split that out too.

Another reason is to make it easy to enable/disable a particular
feature (e. g.  libnss-myhostname).

And then of course the infamous "need to run with sysvinit/upstart",
which other distros don't need to be concerned about :-)

> So I suggest following scheme

FTR, this isn't too far away what we already do in Debian/Ubuntu:

> systemd

check

> systemd-libs
> systemd-devel

They are called a bit differently for distro policy, upgrade safety,
consistency, and multi-arch support reasons; we need separate binary
packages for every lib*.so. But in spirit, "check".

> systemd-journal-remote (so gatewayd,remote,upload)

Check, we have exactly this package name.

> systemd-networkd (maybe also with resolved?)

We currently keep that in the "systemd" package as splitting it out
now is a bit of an upgrade pain, but we discussed doing this.

> systemd-machine (machined,nspawn,importd)

We call that package "systemd-container", but it has exactly those, so
"check".

> systemd-firstboot (firstboot,sysusers?,factory stuff?)

We don't have a separate package for that.

> systemd-hwdb

We split out the entire udev, including hwdb. This nicely reduces the
footprint in containers and also allows us to use udev with
sysvinit/upstart.

Martin

-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)