[gentoo-dev] Making systemd more accessible to "normal" users

[Fabio Erculiani]

PLEASE DO NOT START A FLAME WAR AND READ ON FIRST.
THIS IS NOT A POST AGAINST OPENRC.

With the release of Sabayon 13.04 [1] and thanks to the efforts I put
into the systemd-love overlay [2], systemd has become much more
accessible and easy to migrate to/from openrc. Both are able to
happily coexist and logind/consolekit detection is now done at
runtime.
It is sad to say that the "territoriality" in base-system (and
toolchain) is not allowing any kind of progress [3] [4]. This is
nothing new, by the way.

There are several components that need patching in order to work as
expected with systemd:
- polkit needs a patch that enables runtime detection of logind/consolekit
- pambase needs to drop USE=systemd and always enable the optional
module pam_systemd.so
- genkernel needs to migrate to *udev (or as I did, provide a --udev
genkernel option), mdev is unable to properly activate LVM volumes and
LVM is actually working by miracle with openrc. Alternatively, we
should migrate to dracut.
- networkmanager need not to install/remove files depending on
USE=systemd but rather detect systemd at runtime, which is a 3 lines
script.
- openrc-settingsd needs to support eselect-settingsd, which makes
possible to switch the settingsd implementation at runtime, between
openrc and systemd. This also removes the silly conflict between
openrc-settingsd and systemd friends.
- genkernel should at least support plymouth (work in progress my side)
- other ~490 systemd units are missing at this time and writing them
could also be a great GSoC project (don't look at me, I'm busy
enough).

All this would come with no cost for the current openrc state
(actually, my initramfs speed improvements patches in genkernel.git
also benefit openrc).
If Gentoo is about choice, we should give our users the right to
choose between the init system they like the most.

It looks like there is some consensus on the effort of making systemd
more accessible, while there are problems with submitting bugs about
new systemd units of the sort that maintainers just_dont_answer(tm).
In this case, I am just giving 3 weeks grace period for maintainers to
answer and then I usually go ahead adding units (I'm in systemd@ after
all).

The only remaining problem is about eselect-sysvinit, for this reason,
I am probably going to create a new separate pkg called
_sysvinit-next_, that contains all the fun stuff many developers were
not allowed to commit (besides my needs, there is also the need of
splitting sysvinit due to the issues reported in [4]). I am sure that
a masked alternative sysvinit ebuild won't hurt anybody and will make
Gentoo a bit more fun to use.

The final outcome will hopefully be:
- easier to migrate from/to systemd, at runtime, with NO recompilation
at all (just enable USE=systemd and switch the device manager from
*udev to systemd -- unless somebody wants to drop the udev part from
systemd, if at all possible)
- we give the users the right to choose without driving them nuts with
weird emerge-fu.
- we make possible to support new init systems in future, and even
specific init wrappers (bootchart anyone?)
- we prepare the path towards a painless migration from consolekit
(deprecated for long time now) to logind (we probably need to fork it
off the systemd pkg -- upstream projects are _dropping_ consolekit
support right now!)
- we put back some fun into Gentoo

If you want to see a working implementation of my systemd-love
efforts, just go download [1] and see things working yourself.

[1] http://www.sabayon.org/release/press-release-sabayon-1304
[2] https://github.com/Sabayon/systemd-love
[3] For instance: https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=465236
[4] "useless crap": https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=399615

Cheers,
-- 
Fabio Erculiani