[systemd-devel] [ANNOUNCE] systemd v221

[Kay Sievers]

On Fri, Jun 19, 2015 at 5:07 PM, Filipe Brandenburger
<filbranden at google.com> wrote:
> Guys let's try to be constructive here...
>
> This time it shouldn't be too painful for downstreams since the revert
> was the last patch to the man subtree so just a git revert of that
> should get your trees to the state you need to get v221 packages for
> Debian and Ubuntu. In that sense, I think we're still (slightly)
> better off than we were in v220 and I think we have all we need to
> solve this one for good in v222.
>
> And let's use the momentum to try to solve this soon, in which case
> you could even replace the revert of that commit with the backport of
> the next one (which will probably remove the disted manpages).

I was involved in the decision to revert it. And I'm sure we should
not add the patch back.

The split-usr option is not much more than an "upgrade path" for
traditional unix layouts to merge the operating system into a single
directory. The split-usr option is nothing upstream systemd could
fully suport. We need the unified layout for several options systemd
offers, and more and more new things will rely on it. Split-usr will
not got away anytime soon, but it will get less and less support
regarding new features we add to systemd.

The last-minute revert was not properly communicated, I am sorry for
that, but the technical reasons for the revert are still true. Not
dist'ing the man pages does not make the feature itself correct. We
should not provide options to render the man page content
inconsistently. The search paths would need to be mangled too, or none
of them. But again, I am against upstream support for man split-usr
man pages because systemd cannot fully support split-usr anyway, and
should not pretend it does. Please do that downstream where the
classic file system layout is supported.

Thanks,
Kay