systemd: please stop trying to take over the world :)

[Lennart Poettering]

On Mon, 13.06.11 12:37, Simo Sorce (simo at redhat.com) wrote:

> 
> On Mon, 2011-06-13 at 18:01 +0200, Denys Vlasenko wrote:
> > > We invoke sethostname() from inside systemd since that is one of the
> > > most trivial system calls known to men and doing this with a
> > separate
> > > binary is just absurd. This way we also can ensure that the hostname
> > is
> > > always initialised which is very useful for early boot logging and
> > other
> > > stuff. On systemd you get the guarantee that the hostname is always
> > set
> > > up if you run in userspace,
> > 
> > You can't possibly know what kind of (possibly dynamic) hostname
> > admin might want to assign to his machine. The static hostname
> > may be as useless as default "(none)" which is set by kernel.
> > Anyway, logging with default hostname is not a catastrophe.
> > 
> > Why do you set up stuff no one asked you to?
> 
> Changing a machine hostname at random times is just asking for
> trouble.

Well, but it has been used in the past, and as definitely something we
should support in one way or another. Which is why we have this:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/nssmyhostname

and 

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/hostnamed

and there are even people working on sending out change notifications
from /proc/sys/kernel/hostname in the kernel.

> What's the problem of having a specific hostname set up at boot time ?

The user might want to change it? DHCP wants to change it? Name conflict
in the local network, and Avahi wants to change it? Of course, the
latter we don't necessarily want to do by default, but they are valid uses.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.