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Comment by vezzy-fnord | Hacker News Reader

I guess the debian guys busted that myth.

Nope, they haven't. systemd-shim is a fundamentally unsustainable idea: http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/de...

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Thanks for that link, it provides an interesting counterpoint.

I'm not sure I agree that it's an unsustainable idea to keep a wrapper updated. If people really are interested in it, surely they will keep it updated. Lots of open source projects bitrot, and the general reason is lack of interest in keeping them working. Given the number of times I've seen the non-portability complaint, it's especially surprising that noone but Steve Langesek (according to your link) has seen fit to contribute code.

I do agree though that it would be better if systemd standardised those interfaces that people want to use, such as the logind interface.

The systemd interface portability and stability chart lists logind as not being independently reimplementable, and I don't see that changing soon.

Steve Langasek was an Upstart project leader, and systemd-shim was never intended to be more than a temporary workaround, from what I know. Fact is, targeting the internal D-Bus interfaces is an exercise in perpetually playing catch-up.

I think the 'Reimplementable Independently' just means that it is straightforward to reimplement on top of systemd (although that isn't made very clear). Since the external login DBus interface is standardized, I can't imagine why it would be difficult to reimplement logind on top of another init system.

edit-grammar

Systemd does standardize many interfaces[1] (including logind).

[1] - http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/InterfacePo...

Reimplementable Independently: No

Ian Sutton, who embarked on a project to emulate some of the systemd D-Bus daemons, also attests to the "standardization" being largely a red herring: http://darknedgy.net/files/systembsd.pdf

I don't think 'Reimplementable Independently' means what you think it means. See my reply to your other post for more details[1].

I'm not sure I get how those slides indicate that the systemd interfaces are not standardized (with the possible exception of timedated, although the slides were kind of vague). Most of the problems seemed to be due to the fact that OpenBSD doesn't support PAM. Was there a particular section you were referring to?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10234379

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