[systemd-devel] [RFC] the chopping block

[Martin Pitt]

Hello,

answering for Debian/Ubuntu.

Lennart Poettering [2016-02-11 18:06 +0100]:
> 1) systemd-initctl (i.e. the /dev/initctl SysV compat support). Last
>    time Debian was still using that, maybe this changed now?

This would apply if you boot with systemd, then install sysvinit, and
want to reboot the machine (using SysV's /sbin/reboot), right? Or the
other way around?

This is still somewhat relevant for Debian, but maybe there's
something simpler that can be done for that case? If there's any other
way to reboot the machine in that situation, it can also become
documentation.

Not relevant for Ubuntu.

> 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?

D/U dropped the compat libs months ago.

> 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?

First time I hear about it TBH. I'm not a GNOME-y/desktop-y person any
more, but this suggests that it's nowhere being used except for the
rather old systemd-ui:
https://codesearch.debian.net/perpackage-results/systemd-reply-password/2/page_0

dracut apparently installs it into the generated initrd, but that's a
trivial thing to drop.

> 5) Here's the controversial one I think: support for booting up
>    without /var.

Some deprecation time would be appreciated, so that we have time to
adjust initramfs-tools, at least for common cases. Traditionally /var
has never been required for early boot, thus there are a fair number
of people using /var on NFS (judging by bug reports that we get), and
squeezing that into an initrd might cause some trouble.

Thanks,

Martin
-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)