The Debian init system general resolution returns

Posted Oct 17, 2014 21:00 UTC (Fri) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)
In reply to: The Debian init system general resolution returns by jspaleta
Parent article: The Debian init system general resolution returns

A cursory inspection of the systemd-shim source tree indicates that systemd-shim is not a fork of systemd. It is an independent reimplementation of a subset of systemd's functionality, which imports a few source files from the systemd code base.

The Debian init system general resolution returns

Posted Oct 17, 2014 21:02 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (2 responses)

a "few" source files... hmmm... yes well.. you say potato I say fork.

-jef

The Debian init system general resolution returns

Posted Oct 17, 2014 21:13 UTC (Fri) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (1 responses)

A few. To be precise, two .c and three .h files (out of the total of sixteen files comprising the C source code), which contain rather generic helper functions and look to be rather extensively pruned compared to wherever in systemd they came from, too.

This really, really isn't a "fork of systemd" by any reasonable definition of the phrase.

The Debian init system general resolution returns

Posted Oct 17, 2014 22:06 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

Whatever this is it isn't an independently create implementation from the api documentation. Considering the majority of functional code in the first commit into the revision control in both github and launchpad are in files lifted directly from systemd codebase, I'm going to still call it a fork and sleep well at night. Agree to disagree I guess. The cgmanager support in the current tip of the codebase is certainly much diverged so I can understand your point of view that its now diverged to the point where just taking a snapshot of the tip as it exists to day, with no historic context, might make it look like a fresh implementation instead of a diverged fork.

Either way I hope debian is able to sustain it and cgmanager, even if Canonical looses interest in maintaining either with staffed manpower. As clearly these two codebases are going to be critical if Debian is serious about multi-init support. GNOME might be today's firefight..but this is just a prelude to the much more difficult discussion concerning container support and the cgroup management question bound up in that. And containers go right to the heart of Debian's relevance in the server workloads and a much more interesting issue for the project long term I think. But I digress.

-jef