The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate [LWN.net]

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 21, 2014 3:31 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate by dlang
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

> But creating new APIs for basic plumbing functionality like name lookups and logging is not a good thing to be doing for portability.
I think it's a good thing. The old API has become ossified and is not really suited for the modern needs.

So an update is definitely in order. Systemd does this a bit too revolutionary, but in the end most of the proposed APIs are not very Linux-specific. They are just not implemented yet elsewhere.

But that is being fixed already. And what's more, it's definitely possible and not even _hard_ to implement API-compatible fallbacks for other systems for most of systemd functionality.

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The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 21, 2014 3:45 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (6 responses)

> I think it's a good thing. The old API has become ossified and is not really suited for the modern needs.

What is the exact failure with the existing APIs that cannot be solved without involving DBUS?

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 21, 2014 3:49 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (5 responses)

They are not asynchronous, they don't cope well with international domain names, no support for DNSSEC, poor support for multiple networks and interfaces (no way to do gethostbyname limited to a single interface) - that's what I personally encountered.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 21, 2014 8:33 UTC (Fri) by rleigh (guest, #14622) [Link] (4 responses)

Assuming that all these are true and are important problems which need fixing, a dbus API and service is still an awful solution to the problem. It could be trivially implemented in a simple library. It could also be discussed on the Austin list and fixed in POSIX if people really care about having these things fixed properly for the long term.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 21, 2014 9:09 UTC (Fri) by peter-b (guest, #66996) [Link] (2 responses)

> Assuming that all these are true and are important problems which need fixing, a dbus API and service is still an awful solution to the problem. It could be trivially implemented in a simple library.

Trivially? Oh excellent! Since it's so straightforward, why don't you quickly knock something out over the weekend, so we can then put this whole discussion to rest? I"m sure Lennart would be really happy for other developers to get involved in tackling this problem.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 21, 2014 11:14 UTC (Fri) by rleigh (guest, #14622) [Link] (1 responses)

Trivial in the sense that it would be simpler and more portable to do via a standard library interface than via dbus. And the work has apparently already been done given that there's an implementation out there using dbus in systemd.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 21, 2014 11:17 UTC (Fri) by mchapman (subscriber, #66589) [Link]

> Trivial in the sense that it would be simpler and more portable to do via a standard library interface than via dbus.

Um. D-Bus *is* a standard library interface in practically every mainstream programming language.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 25, 2014 22:16 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Quite. It's not like the Austin Group is a bunch of terrible monsters who beat off people making suggestions with flaming shovels.