On 10/31/19 9:32 PM, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote: > Let's take e2fsprogs for example. I had applied a patch which had a > cron script alternative on top of the timer unit file. It turns out > the cron script was buggy, and it took multiple tries before we got it > right --- because I don't maintain a test system with sysvinit to test > it. So I applied patches, but I was *not* doing my own testing before > releasing updates with the cron support. I'd call that "best efforts" > support. > > The GR should make clear whether or not what I did was sufficient --- > I took patches and attempted bug fixes to support sysvinit --- or > whether I should have been doing more explicit testing for sysvinit.
As much as I understand, at this point in time, the project considers that what you did was enough. I don't think we need a GR for this. > The GR should also make clear whether it would be a good thing if I, > as the Debian Maintainer, were to deliberately use some esoteric > systemd feature for which there is not non-systemd alternative in a > package's packaging scripts. (I wouldn't do such a thing, in general, > since I personally a good programmer should do things portably, and > using an esoteric systemd feature is *not* good programming practice. > But it's clear that others, like perhaps Josh Triplett, feel > differently. And I don't feel that I should necessarily be imposing > my personal beliefs on everyone.) IMO, this type of decision should go in the policy, case by case, and I'm not sure a GR is the solution: it's going to be a generic "use all of systemd" vs a "be careful to use only things implemented elsewhere". I don't think this works, as often, there is maybe a middle ground "well, it depends on the situation". For the systemd-sysusers in tomcat9, probably best would have been to keep thinks as they were rather than using an implementation that only has the side effect as to get locked-in, especially when it's easy to avoid the problem. For other cases, maybe it's nice to be able to use systemd-only features, and here I'm thinking namely about cgroup stuff, for example. Cheers, Thomas Goirand (zigo)