[systemd-devel] feature request: dlopen

[Lennart Poettering]

On Tue, 17.02.15 20:24, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton (lkcl at lkcl.net) wrote:

>  i note that there was announcement recently that the systemd team
> 'listens to users', so i am taking you at your word on that.

Hmm, I am not aware of such an "announcement". I generally listen
though, but I don't always agree. I particularly don't listen to badly
researched conspiracy theories.

> so i'm not going to "protest" - i'm going to try a different approach.
> i'd like you to look at this list of debian packages that are
> dependent on libsystemd0:
> http://lkcl.net/reports/removing_systemd_from_debian/list_of_libsystemd0_dependent_packages.txt

Well, I doubt this is correct, and even if it was, I am not sure what
systemd upstream has to do with it. Convince the upstream developers
in question not to link against systemd's libraries, or convince the
distros not to package it like that. We just offer a library, which
apparently is interesting to people to use, but whether they use it is
really not up to us.

Also, what precisely is the problem with having a dependency on that
library? If it's pulled in and nothing else of systemd, where
precisely is your problem? It's just code lying around, and there is
tons of stuff like that.

If you think that code we wrote is really evil shit, that should never
touch your system, then I figure it's too late. The folks involved in
systemd touched a lot more of your system, outside of the systemd
umbrella, our code is in much of the stack, in the desktop and in the
kernel. If you want to avoid using the code we wrote you'll have a
really hard time.

> as i am partly writing to a public audience who may not be so
> knowledgeable, please excuse me for describing that the advantages,
> are, as you know, that a pre-compiled package may, at runtime, detect
> what is available to it and use it. it may even be configured via a
> config option to disable the use of that functionality at runtime even
> if the dynamic library is present.  you know this.

dlopen() is something the programs *using* a library must make use of,
it's not up to us, the providers of the library.

> i am one of the few people who can cut through all that, who has gone
> to the trouble of digging into why libsystemd0 is found to be so
> objectionable. 

Good for you!

> i have to tell you: i even heard, on slashdot, that microsoft is now
> using - to significant success - the situation surrounding systemd as
> a sales pitch to have GNU/linux systems successfully replaced with
> windows servers.  

Good one!

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering, Red Hat