[systemd-devel] [PATCH] man: ship systemd-udevd as the real manpage

[Kay Sievers]

On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 1:51 PM, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek
<zbyszek at in.waw.pl> wrote:
> On 07/31/2012 11:56 AM, Lennart Poettering wrote:
>> On Sun, 29.07.12 12:43, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek (zbyszek at in.waw.pl) wrote:
>>>> We name all the service man pages after the service name, since that is
>>>> how people will primarily come in contact with it (i.e. they'll do
>>>> "systemctl start systemd-udevd.service", but never run
>>>> /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-udevd directly).
>>>>
>>>> We design this stuff so that it is nicely integrated and uniform in its
>>>> behaviour. We'll not depart from that because people who don't use
>>>> systemd might be confused.
>>>
>>> I'm not interested in installing without systemd myself, but I still
>>> don't think this is a bad idea: the change is transparent in current
>>> default installation (if we ignore the change in the title of a
>>> manpage), and apparently it helps people who install without systemd.
>>
>> It's actually not transparent, since the man page lists both names
>> anyway and the primary name exposed in URLs such as
>> http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-udevd.service.html
>> are actually very much visible.
> Right.
>
>> I mean, this is admittedly all more on the side of nitpicking, rather
>> then anything important, but I think it is nice to keep things as
>> straightforward as possible, and stick to one scheme and one scheme only
>> for naming things. And that scheme is: if its in /usr/bin, then name it
>> by executable name, otherwise by service name.
> OK.
>
> But the problem remains: there are people who want to just build udev.
> And this is officially supported, as promised in the announcement of the
> udev+systemd merge.

We promised to keep udev properly *running* as standalone, we never
told that it can be *build* standalone. And that still stands.

We never claimed, that all the surrounding things like documentation
always fully match, if only udev is picked out of systemd.

I would welcome if people stop reading that "promise" into the
announcement, it just wasn't written there.

> I would think that an easy way to build and install
> just udev related parts would be nice.

It's mostly just a rather trivial packaging problem which needs to be
solved, and there is quit some more stuff than the direction of the
alias of the udev man page. If udev is supposed to run on systems
which will never have systemd, the man page and the paths need to be
patched anyway, because it makes not much sense to have all the
systemd references, locations and systemd socket activation in it.

In summary: We merged udev and sytemd to fully and properly merge
things wherever it makes sense. All uniformity in systemd as a whole
always beats any possible convenience when using only udev, as long as
it does not affect the reliable runtime operation of a standalone
udev.

Thanks,
Kay