[arch-general] systemd new dependencies impede using OpenRC

[Daniel Micay]

On 01/07/15 07:14 PM, Jens Adam wrote:
> Thu, 2 Jul 2015 00:43:13 +0200
> Guus Snijders <gsnijders at gmail.com>:
> 
>>> Why in the world should util-linux require systemd!? Why do all
>>> these packages need it when they were fine without it before?  
>>
>> The first question is a relatively simple, technical question. My
>> guess is that the util-linux won't currently run without system
>> installed, hence the dependancy. Arch packages are usually quite
>> 'clean' in that respect. It's probably possible to recompile it
>> without that dependency for this specific case.
> 
> A little fiddling with 'pacman -Qql util-linux' and 'ldd' reveals that
> the only tools linked to (lib)systemd are 'logger', 'lslogins' and
> 'uuidd'.

So it's a hard runtime dependency for a core tool that's widely used
(logger). Making it into an optional dependency would cause runtime
crashes and it would be especially bad in this case because other
packages depend on util-linux for utilities like logger.

Splitting it out into another package would be the Debian solution, but
Arch avoids that to avoid complexity. Gentoo handles this with USE flags.

> Aside from that: Yes, some packages do have too broad dependencies
> (e.g. systemd instead of libsystemd) and it certainly didn't help
> that udev became part of systemd, but in the end the train we're on
> drove off long ago, so until systemd's successor arrives on the scene
> it's probably best to accustom yourself to it and test it until all
> the bugs and edge cases are accounted for.

The package isn't going to be split so it doesn't make much sense to
refer to libsystemd. It's considered part of the mandatory base system
and the developers aren't going to go out of the way to make it optional
by adding this kind of complexity on their end.w

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