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GSOC Project Works To Emulate Systemd For OpenBSD
An anonymous reader writes Through a Google Summer of Code project this year was work to emulate systemd on OpenBSD. Upstream systemd remains uninterested in supporting non-Linux platforms so a student developer has taken to implementing the APIs of important systemd components so that they translate into native systemd calls. The work achieved this summer was developing replacements for the systemd-hostnamed, systemd-localed, systemd-timedated, and systemd-logind utilities. The hope is to allow for systemd-dependent components like more recent versions of GNOME to now run on OpenBSD.
Not really.
* This software is not going to end up in the base system but in ports. It will not have a big effect on the base system.
* The goal of the project is not to import the systemd programs like the NTP daemon or the cron daemon. Instead, it implements some of the APIs so it will be easier to port software that depends on some systemd features.
When the software is ready and ends up in OpenBSD ports, it will probably only be installed if you install a piece of software that depends on systemd (future gnome, for instance). So if you don't install these kinds of software, you don't even end up having "systembsd" on your computer.
In what way is the refuge gone now?
The three services are actually needed.
The systemd-localed is simple: it provides the user with capability to change the locale on the fly (and applications with the ability to react on the locale change).
The systemd-timedated does almost the same for the date and time.
And the systemd-logind is basically a dbus wrapper to provide access to log-out/shutdown/etc functions.
The usefulness of logind can be argued, but centralized management of date/time and locale changes were long overdue. Linux is pretty much the only OS remaining, where application, if needed, can't really know if/when date/time or locale has changed.
In no way the services itself depend on the systemd - they are simply part of the systemd package. Nothing more.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
The three services are actually needed.
For what? If you say "to bring more windowsisms to linux" then I can believe it. Otherwise, not so much.
The usefulness of logind can be argued, but centralized management of date/time and locale changes were long overdue. Linux is pretty much the only OS remaining, where application, if needed, can't really know if/when date/time or locale has changed.
Unix (not so much linux) has for a really long time been a multi-user system, where multiple users can use different locales and different time zones. The system itself always ran on UTC. UTC is not supposed to change. Users changing their locale need to log out and back in again. That works well enough for the expected frequency of such changes occurring and doesn't need lots of code to notify every running process AND lots of code in every running process to deal with the change.
As an engineering tradeoff, the Unix way makes sense to me. The poetterix way, not so much. So I don't really buy your "long overdue", no.