Hi Johannes, On Wed, Feb 08, 2023 at 03:03:58PM +0100, Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues wrote: > I think this boils down to deciding whether or not you want systemd > specifically or not. If you don't (and I'd like that because I want to use > debvm to work even on snapshot.d.o timestamps from before systemd) then the > --skip=systemdnetwork skip option doesn't make much sense. In that case, the > features that debvm offers should be agnostic of the init system and you > should > not have features that require a specific init system. If there is no systemd, > use something else to set up networking and disable that mechanism with > --skip=network. Same with autologin. If it doesn't work with with other init > systems, don't offer it as a (skippable) default. Making skippable features > init system agnostic would also do away with the problem of unskippable skip > implications.
I'm not enthusiastic about supporting non-systemd systems. It is a case where I don't expect much usage and it is difficult to keep working (or takes a lot of effort to write tests). Of course it would be awesome to be more flexible, but at the same time, debvm doesn't make any attempt to supporting non-linux architectures either. The initial idea of it was to make the common case simple as it was too difficult to remember that complex mmdebstrap and qemu invocations. That said, if that's what you need, let's figure out what that is exactly and make it work. That debsnap use case looks a little strange to me. Honestly, if a bug is present since longer than jessie, I wouldn't try tracking it down but consider it always present and just fix it as if it never was fixed. The annoyances of going that far back don't seem worth the effort to me. I recognize that you see things differently somehow. > In mmdebstrap I use the slash to create a hirarchy of skip options. Adding > --skip=cleanup will also imply --skip=cleanup/apt and > --skip=cleanup/reproducible. Maybe you could do the same if you decide to > force > systemd as init system unless the user adds --skip=systemd: Rename > --skip=systemdnetwork to --skip=systemd/network and rename --skip=autologin to > --skip=systemd/autologin. That way, when the user adds --skip=systemd, it can > easily be guessed that all system/* options are skipped by doing that. The > problem with that approach is, that you cannot anymore easily add a > init-system-agnostic network and autologin functionality because if you want > to > then skip that, it's not clear whether or not --skip=network would imply > --skip=systemd/network. I saw that, but wasn't enthusiastic about the hierarchy yet. > Also, is --skip=systemd not a bit misleading? Because what you are skipping is > not systemd but systemd-sysv, no? I see you also dislike that. Based on Jochen's feedback I called it initsystem already. Helmut
