Distribution plans of systemd developers
One for All
© Lead Image © Andrey-Pavlov, 123RF.com
Systemd developers are working on a system that might make the differences between the many Linux distributions easier to tolerate for software users, developers, and vendors – and the Btrfs filesystem plays a central role in their ambitious plans.
Trying to keep up with the release cycle of many Linux distributions can be costly and time consuming. You get your software working for one release, and an update breaks it all over again. Vendors that want to ensure their software runs on Linux computers sometimes simply develop for an operating system version with a long support window, such as an LTS version of Ubuntu, a Debian stable, or RHEL. Problems can occur when the user doesn't even bother to design for compatibility with intermediate versions, or when the user wants to switch to another distro. The cost of keeping pace with the ABI and API changes in Linux is frequently too high.
Lennart Poettering and some other systemd developers have sketched an ambitious proposal [1] addressing the compatibility issues that plague Linux updates. The goal of the plan is to make certain parts of a Linux distribution uniform for all users, admins, developers, and software vendors. If the developers succeed in their efforts, the result will be improved software distribution and security, as well as more seamless support for server, cloud, and embedded environments.
Poettering summarizes the benefits of the plan as follows:
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