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by bigbadfeline
23 days ago
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> systemd-appd doesn't exist yet. This avoids the question, apparently because the design of this part makes it certain that when it does come into existence, it will depend on the rest of systemd. The problem with systemd is that it's purposefully designed to be a viral monolith, without this it's got no purpose. We've been with this long enough to pretend otherwise. |
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Is it though?
Systemd is a project, not just a piece of software. It's got a lot of libraries that are reused across the different components that the systemd project ships. It's not that different from how most C/C++ projects have their own standard library built on top of stdlib/boost/etc. Any new "systemd project" could be done as a completely standalone piece of software, but it would mean recreating a lot of the libraries that already exist.
The biggest piece of coupling to systemd isn't really specifically systemd itself but how systems rely on how systemd does certain things, namely, cgroups. No one wants to manage cgroups themselves, so they use systemd to start services and put them into the cgroup hierarchy, etc. This is exactly one reason desktop environments "rely on systemd" (among others).
Why does everyone want to use cgroups (and thus systemd)? Because it makes managing groups of processes easier, which is directly tied to handling user sessions, which as it turns out, is something most applications want, since typically they deal with users!
Now, systemd's own sub-projects, (eg appd), are likely to be yet another consumer of systemd for similar reasons.
Using systemd, and building on top of it makes it much easier to implement features without having to do everything yourself.