hope not tied to SystemD

Posted Aug 18, 2025 17:41 UTC (Mon) by bluca (subscriber, #118303)
In reply to: hope not tied to SystemD by NYKevin
Parent article: Finding a successor to the FHS

The path is not related in any way, shape or form to any tool. It's distribution and architecture dependent, and that's why there's a convenience utility available.

I assure you that out of ~60000 packages building right now in Debian, and however many are in Ubuntu, exactly _zero_ use systemd-path to query the library directory at build time. A significant fraction of those _will_ need to explicitly know what the exact path is, and they won't use that tool for it.

It's just a utility provided for convenience, it is not part of any specification.

hope not tied to SystemD

Posted Aug 21, 2025 7:06 UTC (Thu) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (1 responses)

> it is not part of any specification.

Good, then you should have no objection to rewording that sentence in a way that clarifies it is non-normative.

I'm glad we're in agreement on that much, at least.

hope not tied to SystemD

Posted Aug 21, 2025 10:15 UTC (Thu) by bluca (subscriber, #118303) [Link]

Feel free to send a PR to adjust any wording of any sentence of any paragraph, and it will be discussed in its own merit

hope not tied to SystemD

Posted Aug 21, 2025 10:14 UTC (Thu) by bluca (subscriber, #118303) [Link]

> I assure you that out of ~60000 packages building right now in Debian, and however many are in Ubuntu, exactly _zero_ use systemd-path to query the library directory at build time. A significant fraction of those _will_ need to explicitly know what the exact path is, and they won't use that tool for it.

This is not a hyperbole btw, I really mean it.

Number of packages calling systemd-path in debian/rules to find per-arch libdir: zero out of 30000

https://codesearch.debian.net/search?q=path%3Adebian%2Fru...

Number of packages using at least one other mean (a specific makefile include file that defines a specific makefile var, none of which are related to systemd): ~5000 out of ~30000

https://codesearch.debian.net/search?q=path%3Adebian%2Fru...