man-db without cache update (no cron or systemd *.timer)

[Lennart Poettering]

On Mon, 20.10.14 15:08, Matthew Miller (mattdm at fedoraproject.org) wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 20, 2014 at 08:56:19PM +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> > But again, I am not sure I understand what is going on here. Is
> > systemd now optional in Fedora?
> 
> I guess to some degree everything is "optional" in one way or another.
> It's certainly the init system we are using. I think the context is in
> cases where the packages are used without an init system, systemd or
> otherwise — the main case being single-process (or at least
> single-parent-process) application containers.
> 
> (I'm also looking forward to systemd as a process manager inside e.g.
> Docker for more sophisticated multi-process applications which for
> whatever reason want to be in the same container, but that's a
> different use case.)

While I can see the reason why you want this I really find this quite
dubious in general. Much of our stack relies on /run and all those
other facilities, of our general execution environment to be properly
initialized, cleaned up and maintained. We do this with tmpfiles
snippets, early-boot services, cron jobs, timer units, and so on and
so on. 

Just saying "no" to these things, ignoring them and not executing them
will only get you so far. It also creates in a way a new execution
environment, unless you perfectly replicate the execution
environment from your container manager, knowing all components in
play, including all libraries and whatever else.

If you really intend to make Fedora in general workable without
providing support for tmpfiles bits, without cron jobs, without timer
units, without setting up the execution environmnt the same way as on
a classic Fedora boot, then please make this a clear goal of
Fedora. But just trying to add this through the backdoor sounds wrong.

Honestly though, I really don't think this is really such a good
idea. You make things much more complicated for developers that
way. We *want* developers to make use of the OS services we provide
after all. It makes the system more uniform and more accessible to our
admins and users. If you take the vast majority of the facilities that
we provide for software away, then very little remains, you devalue
the OS itself.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering, Red Hat