[gentoo-dev] Installing systemd units with gx86 packages

[Michał Górny]

Fellow devs,

I've started working on bringing systemd to Gentoo [1] lately,
and I think it is important to raise the aspect of systemd unit
inclusion in various packages in gx86 ASAP.

The number of packages coming with systemd units is growing rapidly
recently, and that especially applies to freedesktop packages.
One side effect of that is that these packages treat systemd
as an automagic dependency, installing systemd units whenever its
pkgconfig file is installed. I already opened two bugs on that [2,3]
but there would be much more...

That's why I'm asking now: how should we proceed with installing
systemd units?

My current concept of keeping them separate from gx86 packages is good
for a short early testing period but is a maintenance PITA for a longer
term. And requires either adding '--without-systemdsystemunitdir'
to a growing number of packages or removing the systemd.pc file
(to avoid unit collisions).

Thus, I think the correct way of proceeding would be to update gx86
packages to install systemd unit files. As they are plain text files
with no side effects only, this shouldn't hurt at all even while
systemd is not in gx86.

Considering the above, I think it's also unnecessary to introduce
a dedicated USE flag for them. Much like with logrotate, those are only
small, text files which won't do anything (unlike openrc-related
files [4]) if systemd is not being used.

If someone is really opposed to having those files around, I suggest
using INSTALL_MASK. I even consider creating a small tool to simplify
setting common INSTALL_MASKs.

[1] http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=318365
[2] http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=363961
[3] http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=364065
[4] http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=364159

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny