Re: [gentoo-dev] Installing systemd units with gx86 packages

[William Hubbs]

On Sun, Apr 24, 2011 at 04:55:14PM -0500, Canek Peláez Valdés wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 24, 2011 at 4:35 PM, William Hubbs <williamh@g.o> wrote:
> > On Sun, Apr 24, 2011 at 09:36:30AM +0200, Michał Górny wrote:
> >> 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...
> >
> > I think the better way to handle this will be to patch the build systems
> > to not make this an automagic dependency and send those patches
> > upstream.
> >
> > http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/qa/automagic.xml
> >
> > I'm not a member of qa, but I agree with this position on automagic
> > dependencies.
>
> I'm speaking as a simple user, but I don't think the systemd unit
> files qualify as automagic dependencies as described by the QA
> document. In the first place, as Michael pointed out, we can disable
> them with --without-systemdsystemunitdir, so there is no magic at all.

Ah ok, I guess I missed that. The qa document says there is an automagic
dependency if the builder can't turn this off. But, you are asying that
the builder can turn it off with the --without option.

In that case, the dependency is not automagic.

> In the second place, the usual Gentoo way of enabling OpenRC services
> is to *add* init.d scripts in the ebuild, and this is completely
> orthogonal to a package installing a systemd unit file (the presence
> of the later does not matter to OpenRC at all).

This is another topic I may bring up at some point, if you are using
systemd, etc, and openrc is not even installed on your system, do you
need /etc/init.d at all? Once openrc goes stable, I might bring that up
for discussion.

>And finally, the idea
> of systemd is to be a completely distro-agnostic init system, without
> the  multiple failures of SysV, and without the one-company-rule of
> Upstart; this seems to be actually working, hence a lot of downstream
> packages are willing (and eager) to ship systemd unit files. The init
> scripts belong to the packages, they know best how the
> service/whatever needs to be run.
>
> I'm using Gentoo+systemd since a couple of months, and it works
> incredible well. And I really like the idea of freeing the rather
> precious Gentoo-developers time off of writing init scripts.

heh, actually I like this idea also. :-)