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Re: [PATCH 4/4] Mark nscd service as forking in systemd service file (#16639)
- From: Rich Felker <dalias at aerifal dot cx>
- To: Russ Allbery <eagle at eyrie dot org>
- Cc: Siddhesh Poyarekar <siddhesh at redhat dot com>, libc-alpha at sourceware dot org
- Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2014 13:18:14 -0500
- Subject: Re: [PATCH 4/4] Mark nscd service as forking in systemd service file (#16639)
- Authentication-results: sourceware.org; auth=none
- References: <20140226172242 dot GE6419 at spoyarek dot pnq dot redhat dot com> <20140226183950 dot GK184 at brightrain dot aerifal dot cx> <20140226185509 dot GG6419 at spoyarek dot pnq dot redhat dot com> <87a9ddwkyg dot fsf at windlord dot stanford dot edu> <20140227032950 dot GJ6419 at spoyarek dot pnq dot redhat dot com> <87zjldrzp4 dot fsf at windlord dot stanford dot edu>
On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 07:39:51PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> The sd_notify(3) protocol uses an environment variable to signal whether
> to do startup notification and skips the notification if that variable
> isn't set, so a service that supports Type=notify can still be used in the
> other ways with no negative effects. The notification will just be
> skipped. Of course, nscd still has to have that code, and in the glibc
> context that probably means open-coding the sd_notify call in the nscd
> source, which is not horribly attractive. (But the shared library
> dependency issues are probably even worse.)
systemd fans who responded to one of my rants about systemd replied
claiming the intended usage of sd_notify is to copy the code into your
program rather than using the library. However, I suspect there are
license/copyright assignment rule issues that would prevent glibc from
using this approach unless the file is public domain and properly
documented as such.
However, this does mean systemd is (or at least needs to be) promising
to keep the underlying mechanism used by sd_notify stable, so an
alternate approach would be re-implementing sd_notify and assigning
the copyright to the FSF so it could be used in glibc and other GNU
code. (Or, preferably, making it public domain with the proper legal
paperwork so non-[L]GPL projects could use it too.)
Rich