plymouth in @core? [was Re: Attention, dependency fighters]

[Lennart Poettering]

On Fri, 09.11.12 08:53, Matthew Miller (mattdm at fedoraproject.org) wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 09, 2012 at 01:41:08PM +0000, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
> > You might want to remove plymouth from the minimal install since it
> > does not make sense having it there anyway
> 
> Yes probably. Anyone know why it's there?

In rc.sysinit-times ply was the only way how LUKS passwords and suchlike
could be prompted during boot. Hence rc.sysinit in a way relied on
plymouth to be around to fully function. In systemd we have a non-ply
fallback in place however, so prompting passwords on the text console
without ply around should work fine nowadays.

We regularly test systemd upstream with and without plymouth, to make
sure both ways to boot is well supported. Dropping plymouth from the
minimal install set should hence be unproblematic and well supported.

Note that even on systemd without a display plymouth used to be highly
useful since it collected the boot status output from the console and
stored it away in log files. With systemd we now connect all boot
services (that means stdout/stderr and syslog() of all services in the
initrd and early boot) to the journal anyway, so this really useful
functionality of plymouth is not necessary anymore. (In case you wonder,
to get these boot outputs just run "journalctl -b").

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.