[systemd-devel] [RFC] the chopping block

[Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek]

On Thu, Feb 11, 2016 at 06:06:45PM +0100, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> 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?
Fedora ;)
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1125086
But looking at https://bugzilla.samba.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10672#c14
maybe it'd be enough to rebuild samba without the compat headers installed.

> 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. 
Dunno, this is a very visible change. How big are the benefits?

> 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?
Already gone: 36b4a7ba555

Zbyszek