[cycloptic]

>but how many of those projects is it possible to install and use without installing and using at least one other project from the same repo?

Nearly all of them. Have you actually tried to do this? The only thing I can think of off the top of my head that won't really work separately is journald.

[marcan_42]

People actually doing this (i.e. trying to use systemd components on a non-systemd system) end up forking the critical bits and pieces, because trying to build and use them directly from upstream doesn't work well.

See: https://github.com/elogind/elogind https://github.com/gentoo/eudev

So yes, systemd is a mono-repo containing a bunch of loosely-coupled projects, but they are still coupled too tightly to sanely distribute and use separately without a fork.

[newnewpdro]

> but they are still coupled too tightly to sanely distribute and use separately without a fork.

That's not true, forking becomes necessary when what you actually want is a different implementation fulfilling the same dbus interface.

If you just wanted intact systemd-logind and none of the rest, you could fairly trivially build systemd from source and package just logind and libsystemd and get on with your life. Maybe you'd have to carry some patches to inhibit some things like cgroups meddling in the systemd way, but that's no different than what say Debian does for practically every upstream tarball it packages.

Those projects have in a very real sense forked the components for the purposes of modifying their implementations in ways too substantial for some small packaging-time patches to cover.

I'd argue that it actually speaks to the modularity and organization of systemd's code that forking was a more attractive option for these folks than starting over with just the dbus interface in hand.