[systemd-devel] I wonder… why systemd provokes this amount of polarity and resistance

[Martin Pitt]

Hello Rob,

this is higly Debian specific (doesn't even apply to Ubuntu) and thus
a bit off-topic, but as the question already is on the upstream ML..
sorry!

Rob Owens [2014-10-06 14:56 -0400]:
> brasero -> gvfs -> gvfs-daemons -> udisks2 -> libpam-systemd -> systemd-sysv 

You can break it up after libpam-systemd, as this has dependency
alternatives to systemd-shim. With that you can use sysvinit or
upstart. But currently systemd-sysv is the preferred alternative, so
if you don't specify anything else it will pick systemd-sysv. You can
do e. g. "apt-get install brasero systemd-shim" to select another (or
install -shim first).

> I gather that this has something to do with logind and/or cgroups.

That's correct; in fact most desktop-y software talks to logind
only, but logind is a crucial component on a modern desktop.

> Systemd-shim is a duplication of effort.

It's a looong story/history, but systemd-shim itself is actually
fairly small. It's mostly glue to provide systemd's D-BUS API and
implement it in terms of other components like cgmanager and pm-utils.
And its development was quite inevitable at least from
Debian's/Ubuntu's perspective as it is just practically impossible to
do a SysV/upstart → systemd migration on a flag day.

> Not only that, but it must time its releases with the releases of
> systemd-sysv.

Mostly not. That needs to happen for D-BUS API changes like they
happened around version 209, but that happens fairly seldomly.

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