On Wed, 2011-05-18 at 14:09 +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote: [setting the hostname and other little interfaces] > In the long run I expect the following additional interfaces used by > GNOME or one of its components: > > - I am working on two more mechanisms generalizing control of the system > locale and system clock/timezone for use in the control center and by > other UIs.
A while ago, Rodrigo Moya had a lovely idea. Back then we were discussing the problem of distros having different mechanism for "stupid little tasks which should be uncontroversial", like the hostname, timezone, etc. The plan was to introduce D-Bus interfaces to frob these things, and then to cunningly provide an AdminKit with implementations of the corresponding services. Distros would realize, "oh, hey, we can use this pre-made code instead of maintaining our own hacks - let's do that". And then AdminKit would be a de-facto standard interface and unicorns would excrete rainbows. Recalcitrant systems would be de-facto forced to implement those D-Bus interfaces however they please. Your idea, of course, is the same - except that it puts the services in systemd (maybe not systemd itself, but the systemd package). You need somewhere to put them, after all. There are *probably* hit-and-run services like "set the hostname" where D-Bus activation could launch a tiny helper process that changes the hostname and emits a signal, and dies quickly. These present no problem, except for how to ship them. There are *probably* services that need to be running constantly, but I can't think of one right now. Those need a daemon. I'm kind of unhappy of the proliferation of daemons that we had at one point - gnome-session, the user's D-Bus daemon, gnome-settings-daemon, etc. Maybe if we had One Standard Way of loading service-y things into a central daemon, we could save a little memory and context switches? Is this even worthwhile? (If one crashes, it would make things much worse...). Maybe putting your services in an AdminKit would make things more palatable to unenlightened^H^H^H^Htraditionalist systems that don't want to use systemd just yet? (Note: I don't care much where the services are shipped. But putting them in neutral ground may be better/easier in the medium term.) Federico _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list