Re: s6 usability

From: Samuel Holland <samuel_at_sholland.org>
Date: Mon, 2 Dec 2019 17:17:50 -0600

On 12/2/19 3:32 PM, Laurent Bercot wrote:
>> As a guy who has both daemontools and s6 installed on the same box, I
>> thank you from the bottom of my heart for:
>>
>> 1) Prepending s6- to each command so they don't clash with djb's
>> 2) Except for the s6-, naming them the same as djb's so I have less to
>>    remember.
>
> Yes, there are a good number of people, me included, who prefer that
> naming scheme. However, Jan's UX return is valid, and if I want to make
> s6 adoption as easy as possible, it needs to be taken into account too.

>From a Linux distribution perspective, there's also the question of if s6 can be
made a drop-in replacement for daemontools, since it does follow djb's naming
scheme. In gentoo, there are various packages that depend on
virtual/daemontools; for example, the nullmailer test suite uses ipcserver. From
a quick comparison of the documentation, it looks like s6 only adds options, and
remains compatible with the daemontools options.

So would it be valid/acceptable for a distribution to create unprefixed symlinks
to the s6-* binaries? It looks like this would mostly only work for the subset
of the binaries that implement daemontools functionality; some others
(s6-setsid, s6-sudo) would have naming conflicts if they were not prefixed.

Then, with the symlinks, s6 could "provide" virtual/daemontools. Maybe this
would also help discoverability (the issue at hand). Maybe the inconsistency
would cause more harm than good, and the symlinks should be "for compatibility
only".

Thoughts?

Samuel
Received on Mon Dec 02 2019 - 23:17:50 UTC