New systemd

[Jacek Konieczny]

On 02/07/14 21:06, Jan Rękorajski wrote:
>> What do you mean by 'cut down'? And what do you consider the 'bloat'.
>> Most the things introduced since 208 may be really useful, and the rest
>> won't break anything.
> 
> ... that's unfortunately not true :( Right now the obstacle is networkd
> and I do consider this daemon a bloat, maybe it improved over time but
> when it came out it was primitive bordering on pathetic _and_ it would just
> kill your network if you had anything more than simple dhcp address.
> Especially with the advanced configs we have in PLD, networkd must be
> disabled by default.

1. from the announcements I got a feeling that networkd is fully
optional and enabled by default only for specific cases (virtualization)

2. PLD rc-scripts, even though has many advanced settings and support
for some very weird setups, is also pathetic and unusable for many
simple and typical use cases.

Let's take the default configuration:
– it would start and auto-configure (DHCP) only the first ethernet
interface, whatever it is during the boot (which is quite unpredictable
when there is more than one)
– it won't even start the DHCP client when there is no link on the
interface. The network won't work until someone manually restarts the
interface. This is a big fuck-up, which only could have make sense 10
years ago when DHCP clients were not able to monitor link state by
themselves.
– there is no way to easily support multiple interfaces with multiple
DNS configuration sources.

All these affect a laptop with Ethernet, WiFi and mobile interfaces used
interchangeably. Of course, dropping all the ifcfg-* configs and using
NetworkManager fixes that, but having a low-level working solution for
that is a good idea too. And that is exactly what networkd provides.

And even some servers need some lightweight, automatic and dynamic
network configuration in times when a server may be a virtual entity
which can be moved around the globe without a reboot.

We could, of course, try to fix rc-scripts with more and more shell
hacking (still trying to keep backward-compatibility), but why force us
to maintain that, when there are other, simple, tested and maintained
solutions.

networkd probably should not be enabled by default if the network is
already configured PLD-way, but otherwise it is good to have it.
I think it could be a good idea to use it by default when there is no
other network configuration. There is a change it will 'just work' in
the most common scenarios. We cannot provide this with our rc-scripts.

>>> Systemd upgrade is not someting we can "just bump and rebuild",
>>
>> Yes.
>>
>>> and I don't have the time for it (job change, moving house, etc.)
>>
>> Maybe someone else can take care of that. It could be me, but not now.
> 
> Anyone can do it, but has to be very, very carefull when doing so.

Yes.

Greets,
	Jacek