Can we depend on timedated?

[Neal Gompa]

On Sun, Jul 23, 2023 at 2:06 PM Martin Steigerwald <martin at lichtvoll.de> wrote:
>
> 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.
>

The reason the timedate1 interface was created was because there is no
standard for this. Without that interface, it depends on which time
service you're using.

Even hostnames data didn't have a standard before systemd essentially
standardized Debian's /etc/hostname everywhere.

It took systemd to create standardized D-Bus interfaces that things
could rely on. They're well-defined, so alternative implementations
could be made.

I suspect that an alternative implementation will only be made once
it's really demanded for something people want.





--
真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!