Hi Steve,

On Mon, 2023-10-16 at 23:08 -0400, Steve Litt wrote:

..cut..

> >
> > One of the problems in such conversion is that the declarative
> > files
> > come and go on the filesystem,
>
> I don't understand your preceding half sentence. Unless they're on
> /tmp, they stay on the filesystem. So I obviously misunderstood your
> meaning.

I mean that there is no event to catch when new ones are installed.

> > while the *init system expects scripts
> > or something else.
>
> I can write a program to write a script, and that program can use a
> script template that gets its token values from the key-value pairs
> on
> a conf file (I refuse to use the word "declarative", loaded term).
>
> > Adding triggers to handle the conversion is a
> > possible but quite lacking approach.
>
> You and I envision two different things. My vision is that people on
> the Devuan project run the conversion and then package the s6 and
> runit
> run scripts, as well as sysvinit init scripts, OpenRC init scripts,
> and
> Epoch config files.
>
> Additionally, I envision the key-value file to have script snippets
> in
> it for instances in which key-value to script is too difficult.

Writing the converters themselves is one thing. The user filesystem may
be (ab)used to call the converters on the fly and present the resulting
files/folders to the respective init system.


> > IMnsHO one really clean way to
> > implement the above is by FUSE filesystem that does the conversion
> > on
> > the fly and presents a folder with the expected hierarchy for the
> > particular *init. Writing that is not too complex, I also believe
> > that
> > there are people around who have some experience in this (hello
> > Ralph)...
>
> Knowing little about FUSE, I personally can't do the preceding, but
> if
> that's the better way to do it, I'll certainly step aside.

See above - writing the converters is one thing, presenting their
results via FUSE is another...

> >
> > Imagine "mount -t sd2sysv /lib/systemd /etc/init.d" ;)
> >
> > PS. I do not believe that sd unit files will drastically change to
> > the
> > extent that makes them too hard to follow. It will (as someone
> > already
> > said) going to mostly add stuff. Imagine the vast amount of unit
> > files
> > already written getting obsoleted - this would be a pure example of
> > shooting oneself in the foot.
>
> I can see the redhat/opendesktop/poettering/microsoft cabal eagerly
> shooting themselves in the foot if they think it will shoot a
> competitor without resources to heal his foot. But both my preceding
> sentence and your estimate of the likelihood of shooting themselves
> in
> the foot are guesses. My personal preference would be to have a
> conversion program from unit file to titofile, even if for the time
> being that conversion file is simply a copy operation. This way we're
> covered if my guess is right, and we incur little work if you're
> right.

Maybe I have missed something - converting systemd unit files to any
(known to me) init system will require conversion.

With best regards,
b.