Here's the 31st post highlighting key new features of the current v257 release of systemd. #systemd257
In an earlier installment of this series we already talked about "systemd-repart", systemd's "elastic", automatic repartitioning tool, that can also be used as installer and image building tool.
One thing systemd-repart can do for you is to initialize the partitions it creates with initial data. This can be a freshly generated fs that it copies files into, but there's also CopyBlocks=…
@pid_eins I think all these new features are amazing, but I don't think many people are actually going to use them anytime soon.
Most distros seem to only use a tiny subset of modern systemd features, and IMHO more effort needs to be put on helping with downstream integration and working *with* existing projects.
@hughsie oh, my day only has 24h. And so has everyone else's on the systemd maintainer team. We do what we can working with people, but of course there are limits to everything we can do.
@pid_eins Ohh I'm not asking anyone to work harder, I'm merely suggesting that the upstream team take their foot off the new-features accelerator, and make sure that the great stuff is actually being picked up by distros and actually in the hands of end-users.
The hard (and slow) part of distro engineering is the change proposals, the test days, the marketing, the new QA tests -- not new upstream features.
@hughsie @pid_eins it is nice though to have solutions already available on the shelf when having to fix technical debt in distributions. Also systemd-repart is a tool that developers can just use for other purposes. For instance embedded development. Distributions do not have to use it right now. In addition, Snapd had to have a similar tool to make Ubuntu Core. If systemd-repart was available at that time, it would have been used instead.
@hughsie @Valentin Oh, we have plenty of good cooperation going on with some projects, in particular GNOME OS people, or at least two of the hyperscalers.
I think it's not surprising though that this works better with some projects than with others. In particular Snap being this half-commercial thing from a vendor who isn't necessarily known as the best player in Open Source is not the really the ideal candidate for more cooperation I guess. That said, I had fruitful discussions…
@hughsie …with some people from the Snap team (mostly ex- I think though). But talking and doing then again are still two different things.