Re: Service refactoring

[Ludovic Courtès]

宋文武 <address@hidden> skribis:

> 2015-09-24 15:41 GMT+08:00 Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden>:
>> "Thompson, David" <address@hidden> skribis:
>>
>>> On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 12:00 PM, Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> wrote:
>>>> Andy Wingo <address@hidden> skribis:
>>>>
>>>>> On Sun 20 Sep 2015 15:42, address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès) writes:
>>>>>
>>>>>> I’m quite happy with the result, but comments are welcome!  I’ll convert
>>>>>> some more services to see how it goes.
>>>>>
>>>>> Neat!  Sounds great.  One question: there are some services like colord
>>>>> or geoclue that don't need to be managed by DMD, but are just declared
>>>>> as services so that their users are created, there /var/foo directories
>>>>> are created, etc.  The can be started by D-Bus as needed.  Does the new
>>>>> design support services of this kind?
>>>>
>>>> Yes it does.
> Great news! I don't miss NixOS's modules anymore :-)

Heheh, NixOS modules are a very good competitor.  ;-)

I think this model handles multiple service instances better than NixOS
modules.  NixOS services can be enabled/disabled, for instance with
‘services.httpd.enable = true’ or ‘services.openssh.enable = true’, but
I don’t think there’s a general mechanism to have multiple instances of
httpd or sshd.

Also in NixOS any service can do ‘foo.bar = baz’ and change an unrelated
OS setting, which is not possible here.

I find the fixed-point approach of NixOS modules very elegant, but it
also complicates things: It’s easy to enter an infinite recursion, and
one has to carefully use ‘mkIf’ and similar constructs where it matters,
which is non-obvious.

> I think the difference is that we don't seperate options and implementations
> like NixOS did,  'service-type' have both in one place.

‘service-type’ is sort-of an interface: it describes how services are
composed, but not what they do.

> So, our services is highly tie to gexps and dmd (that's ok).

The whole thing is rather tied to gexps, but it’s not tied to dmd.  dmd
is just a service that has nothing special, and (gnu system) does not
embed any knowledge about dmd.

The only service type that’s known to (gnu system) is
‘boot-service-type’.

Thanks for your feedback!

Ludo’.