Rick Moen <r...@linuxmafia.com> writes: > Quoting Rainer Weikusat (rweiku...@talktalk.net): > >> The purpose of libsystemd0 is to enable packages whose code has been >> 'enhanced' with spurious systemd depedencies to work on systemd-less >> systems. That's absolutely not harmless. > > Your implied concept of 'purpose' is IMO a bit problematically abstract > and teleological for my taste. What I find more connected to the real > world, clearer in reference to my experience, is the concept of > _function_, i.e., what things do.
That's neither 'abstract' nor 'teleological' as you yourself nicely demonstrated by immediately coming up with an equivalent but different term after reinterpreting my statement in a way it clearly wasn't meant to be understood by exploiting ambiguities inherent in natural language. The purpose of a door handle is to enable people to open doors. That's technical and not 'teleological'. > As has been abundantly documented, without systemd itself present, > /lib/[$ARCH]/libsystemd.so.0 does basically nothing at all, as it cannot > do anything. Likewise, the base purpose (or function) of a shared library is to enable the runtime linker to resolve certain symbols so that a program requiring them can be started. Take sd_notify as an example. That's ,---- | int sd_notify(int unset_environment, const char *state); | | sd_notify() may be called by a service to notify the service manager | about state changes. `---- https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/sd_notify.html Calls to sd_notify are not useful to anyone except people using 'service managers' implementing the complementary functionality, IOW, to anyone not using systemd. libsystemd enables them to be inserted into applications without openly compromising support for systems without systemd as it provides the required symbols. Regarding systemd as a documented API, libsystemd is nothing but an alternate implementation of it and an alternate implementation created and maintained by the exact same people. _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng