[Arm-netbook] new development laptop needed, looking at dell xps 13 9350

[Ythogtha]

> On 12/07/2016 06:56 AM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
> >  not sure i fully understand what you're saying, but i'm aware that
> > devuan is supporting a huge alternative range of init systems: the
> > only one they *don't* support is... systemd!
> 
> libsystemd is not an init system. The init system is initd. The various
> systemd components can be used for multiple tasks regardless of what
> init system you actually use. But the developers of Devuan have decided
> that systemd is inherently evil for some reason and that a variant of
> Debian that doesn't offer systemd (this is the only substantial
> difference between Debian and Devuan) would somehow be necessary.
> 
> What he is saying is that purging libsystemd like this makes it
> impossible to even check whether or not systemd is actually there, which
> inherently makes no one who develops a program to even optionally use
> part of systemd care about you.

Hi!

	I'm new on this list, so hello everybody :)

If I may make a small remark...
I feel that somehow, having a library installed only to know wether some other
software is present or not feels the wrong way to do things.
	Software already have dependencies and depency checking, wether it is at
build-time or run-time.
	If you write a software that could use any part of systemd, you
shouldn't force the presence of libsystemd to find out if the parts you might
want are present !
	Either it is a compile-time feature, then if you compile it without
systemd, you'll have to rebuild it again if you decide to install systemd, or it
is a run-time feature, and a simple check for dynamically loading a shared
library should be enough to know wether libsystemd is present.

	So I don't see the point in having libsystemd if you do not have any
part of systemd installed !


	When I build ffmpeg, I don't need a lib_is_lame_present to be able to
use lame if it is present ! Either I build it with LAME=yes, and it will fail if
lame isn't there, or it will pass. What would be the point of having some other
library installed to know wether or not lame is there ?
	And if it weren't a compile-time dependency, but a dynamically loaded
library at runtime, the code just has to try to load the library and report that
the functionality isn't present if it fails.

	It should be the same for a software using systemd. Either it is
compiled with libsystemd, therefore you need it to run it. Or it detects at
run-time wether a particular functionality is there, and there is no need to
rely on having libsystemd present to do that.
	The middle ground being to compile with libsystemd, and use it to detect
wether it is actually working and a specific functionality is available. But it
seems easy enough to allow for compiling without libsystemd and then assuming
sysytemd is never there and none of its functionality are usable.
	Rebuild it if things changes, that is the way to do it.

Best regards :)

-- 
<yth at ythogtha.org>