Can we depend on timedated?

[Martin Steigerwald]

Hi Kai.

Kai Uwe Broulik - 20.07.23, 11:18:03 CEST:
> Are there distributions or platforms (FreeBSD?) we support that do not
> provide this? Is there a replacement shim available that talks the
> same protocol?

I am not aware of Devuan supporting this, no matter whether it runs with 
SysVInit, OpenRC or Runit. Actually there is only one package providing 
"timedated" available for Devuan and that is the one Devuan users will 
not install: Systemd. Of course a shim may rename the daemon, but same 
goes for any dbus configuration files. But anyway, I am not aware of any 
efforts in that direction for Devuan. I am running Plasma on Devuan with 
Runit and keep an eye on the developments there. I may have missed 
something, but I doubt it. Devuan has elogind and eudev, but no 
timedated as far as I am aware.

I am also not aware of Alpine supporting a "timedated". But it has 
Plasma packages¹. Alpine uses OpenRC by default. Or… Void Linux which 
uses runit. Which also has Plasma packages.

I am also not sure whether maintainers of these distributions would like 
to take on the burden instead. Recently a minimum udev version bump in 
libgudev1.0-0 in Debian led to non working input in sddm and X11 in 
Devuan Ceres due to eudev as packaged in Devuan does not yet support a 
feature of this newer udev version. This is complicated by the fact that 
eudev is not upstream in Debian as other packages that Devuan relies on. 
Relying on Systemd like interfaces shifts the burden to package 
maintainers of distributions that use something else than Systemd. While 
also basically urging them to re-implement or package parts of Systemd.

I don't have a good answer there, but before Systemd at least on Linux I 
thought there was a standard on how to set and query date and time with 
shell commands. I thought command options to use there would basically 
be the same on all or at least most distributions. Not sure how much 
FreeBSD or Busybox, as is standard, but not mandatory in Alpine, would 
differ here. Now… there are two standards. So it depends on the 
perspective of whom you ask whether anything has become easier here. A 
real new standard would have had to be based on something that everyone 
involved had agreed to.

I am quite sure that right now depending on timedated will break 
functionality for several distributions.

[1] https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/KDE

Ciao,
-- 
Martin