Can we depend on timedated?

[A. Wilcox]

On Jul 23, 2023, at 8:50 AM, Neal Gompa <ngompa13 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 23, 2023 at 9:33 AM Kai Uwe Broulik <kde at privat.broulik.de <mailto:kde at privat.broulik.de>> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi everyone,
>> 
>> the other day I was looking into the date and time KCM which is still
>> using kdelibs4support and thus cannot be built for Plasma 6 at the moment.
>> 
>> While considering what effort it would take to rewrite it in QML, I
>> found that the way the time, date, timezone, etc is set is quite
>> complicated with KAuth and various binaries that are called. So my
>> question is, to make our lives easier:
>> 
>> Can we depend on timedated, or rather, the DBus service provided under
>> the org.freedesktop.timedate1 service on the system bus to delegate all
>> the complicated work there?


Unfortunately that is not portable.


> 
>> Are there distributions or platforms (FreeBSD?) we support that do not
>> provide this? Is there a replacement shim available that talks the same
>> protocol?
> 
> There is InitWare[1], a systemd port to BSDs. It currently doesn't
> build timedated, but it probably could if someone needed it.
> 
> Additionally, there is an alternative (currently-Linux centric)
> implementation called timedatex[2]. It could probably be ported to
> BSDs.


The timedatex project is very systemd-centric.  It even calls out to it
for NTP unit control and others.  It wouldn’t even work on OpenRC
without significant effort, let alone a BSD.


> Finally, probably someone could fork out the existing systemd
> timedated implementation[3] and port it (using basu[4] for the sd-bus
> stuff).
> 
> [1]: https://github.com/InitWare/InitWare <https://github.com/InitWare/InitWare>
> [2]: https://github.com/mlichvar/timedatex <https://github.com/mlichvar/timedatex>
> [3]: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/tree/main/src/timedate <https://github.com/systemd/systemd/tree/main/src/timedate>
> [4]: https://sr.ht/~emersion/basu/ <https://sr.ht/~emersion/basu/>


Using org.freedesktop.timedate1 instead of the current solution
removes no complexity, it just shifts it from KDE to distributions.
Adélie, Devuan, FreeBSD (+ other BSDs), Gentoo, Illumos, etc.

Best,
-A.

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