[Swan] not-a-bug attitude in libreswan project

[Paul Wouters]

On Sun, 19 Apr 2020, Yevgeny Kosarzhevsky wrote:

> not-a-bug attitude in libreswan project

This statement could never be true for one bug. One bug does not make
an attitude. Let's be honest here. You don't like that one bug on you
was closed. So let's talk about that one bug without generalizing it.

> https://github.com/libreswan/libreswan/issues/328
>
> I would like to point out that there is no need to include systemd as
> build-dependency for libreswan and there are may other init systems
> that can run libreswan. Inserting such dependencies shows bad attitude
> towards users and community.

libreswan offers support for many init systems, including sysvinit,
upstart, openrc, systemd and "docker". It is up to the distributions
that compile our packages to enable the right one. Per default,
libreswan tries to auto-detect the init system in use.

libreswan also offers packaging help by supporting some distro's native
packaging. We support building for Fedora, RHEL/CentOS, Debian / Ubuntu
(using make rpm or make deb) and of course the manual "make programs
install". These aids for building on certain distributions are our aids,
aimed at building as the downstream distro's would like to see it. This
helps people to build "as downstream" with newer versions of libreswan
than available downstream.

systemd is not a hard requirement for building libreswan.

As for the bug, it claims:

 	I am getting bogus dependencies for debian. It shows build
 	depends on systemd and I use another init system (sysvinit)

Debian uses sysvinit by default, so that is what our default debian
compile options support. For non-default options, you need to change
the package build and set a different INITSYSTEM.

Obviously, a stock debian binary that is built with systemd as supported
initsystem cannot work out of the box on a non-default debian without
that initsystem. So you have to recompile. That is not a libreswan bug.

A minor issue in your case is that our "control" file, as far as we
know, cannot auto-detect that on a specific flavour of debian with
another initsystem, that there should not be a dependency on systemd.
If there is a way to specify this, please send a patch. If there is
not, please file a bug at debian.

So I believe the bug was properly closed.

A final word on the aggressiveness of systemd vs non-systemd issues.
This bug was opened in a way that it was requesting that systemd
support for libreswan in debian be disabled, despite the fact that
the vast majority of debian systems use systemd. Obviously, your
request is unreasonable.

Both the systemd camp and the non-systemd camp are terrible communicators
and quite rude. We don't want to get dragged into your fight, so please
take it elsewhere.

Paul