[systemd-devel] [RFC] the chopping block

[Lennart Poettering]

On Thu, 11.02.16 17:34, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek (zbyszek at in.waw.pl) wrote:

> 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.

As long as it's only one package I am happy to break this I must say...

> 
> > 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?

Well, there's no single big benefit, just a lot of small ones
everywhere. We can drop deps from various units, we can do clock
bumping via timestamp files from PID1 and things like that. We could
properly order log message from the PID1 invocation on on systems
lacking an RTC, and so on.

> 
> > 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

Fun! I am an idiot!

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering, Red Hat