[arch-general] What can be deleted, when not using systemd - was: polkit package upgrade patch

[Kevin Chadwick]

> Then you should really ask yourself why they take that position.
> AFAICS, there is no solid technical argument for it. 
> 

I believe they just don't think about anything other than the main
and so do the least possible rather than taking the extra steps (or
have too much to think about or on the todo list already). Take firefox
it has a compilation option of no dbus but if dbus fails it refuses to
even start (dbus being a possible route to escape chroot). I had
sorted that by just closing off the dbus after start-up but since
upgrading now get a general "DBUS error" message. 

It was said the linux user space package dependency issue was getting
better but I think it's relapsed and perhaps far worse or more lazy in
some cases.


> > > Now udev has been merged with systemd, and one can wonder
> > > why. According to the authors, it is 'because they share
> > > some common code'. A rather weak argument, that would be
> > > true for almost any two subsystems you can imagine.  
> > 
> > This is a misrepresentation. Udev and systemd were merged I think
> > mainly because they "belong together", but also because they had
> > cyclic build dependencies as they are very tightly integrated.  
> 
> It's no misrepresantation, but an almost literal quote from
> one of the authors.
> 
> Yes, systemd and udev are supposed to work closely together,
> that makes perfect sense. The solution preferred by grown-up
> programmers in such cases is to define stable interfaces on
> both sides allowing them to do that, not to merge them.

I've been wondering lately whether there is a good reason why even udev
violates the "one thing and do it well" principle set forth by the
co worker of the designer of C and Unix as it not only dynamically
creates devices like mdev does but also hotplugging like hotplugd on
OpenBSD. Hopefully there is a config option or you would need an
alternative if you want static dev files and hotplugging.

-- 
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'Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work
together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a
universal interface'

(Doug McIlroy)
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