[systemd-devel] [RFC] the chopping block

[Lennart Poettering]

Heya!

So I am thinking about some spring cleaning, and would love to remove
the following bits from the systemd package:

1) systemd-initctl (i.e. the /dev/initctl SysV compat support). Last
   time Debian was still using that, maybe this changed now?

2) compat support for libsystemd-login.so and friends (these were
   merged into a single libsystemd.so a long time ago). We are still
   building compat libraries to ease the transition, but that was a
   long time ago, hence I'd really love to see this go. Any distro
   still using this?

3) systemd-reply-password – this is really old stuff used by the GNOME
   ask-password stuff which was experimental at best, and never found
   much use. Unless am very wrong pretty much nobody is using this,
   and we can just kill this without replacement. Anybody knows a user
   of this that I am not aware of?

4) Capabilities= support, i.e. the non-ambient and non-bounding-set kind
   of capabilities. They are pretty useless, as fcaps reduce them to
   nothing in pretty much all cases, which is precisely why the
   ambient caps were created. I am pretty sure nothing uses this, as
   it's not realistic to use this at all.

5) Here's the controversial one I think: support for booting up
   without /var. We have kludges at quite a few places because we
   cannot access /var early during boot. I am tempted to stop
   supporting this altogether. Of course, this does *not* mean that
   people with split off /var would be left in the cold. It just means
   that they have to mount /var from the initrd, exactly like this is
   already handled from /usr. 

6) The .snapshot unit type. These sounded like a smart idea, I am
   pretty sure though nobody is using them properly, and they are
   pretty hard to use. If anything like this should exist at al, then
   probably as a concept of "transient targets", but not as a separate
   unit type. Anyone knows any real users of this stuff?

And that's all for now. Opinions?

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering, Red Hat