Re: s6 usability

[Samuel Holland <samuel@sholland.org>]

On 12/2/19 3:32 PM, Laurent Bercot wrote:
>> As a guy who has both daemontools and s6 installed on the same box, I
>> thank you from the bottom of my heart for:
>>
>> 1) Prepending s6- to each command so they don't clash with djb's
>> 2) Except for the s6-, naming them the same as djb's so I have less to
>>    remember.
> 
> Yes, there are a good number of people, me included, who prefer that
> naming scheme. However, Jan's UX return is valid, and if I want to make
> s6 adoption as easy as possible, it needs to be taken into account too.

From a Linux distribution perspective, there's also the question of if s6 can be
made a drop-in replacement for daemontools, since it does follow djb's naming
scheme. In gentoo, there are various packages that depend on
virtual/daemontools; for example, the nullmailer test suite uses ipcserver. From
a quick comparison of the documentation, it looks like s6 only adds options, and
remains compatible with the daemontools options.

So would it be valid/acceptable for a distribution to create unprefixed symlinks
to the s6-* binaries? It looks like this would mostly only work for the subset
of the binaries that implement daemontools functionality; some others
(s6-setsid, s6-sudo) would have naming conflicts if they were not prefixed.

Then, with the symlinks, s6 could "provide" virtual/daemontools. Maybe this
would also help discoverability (the issue at hand). Maybe the inconsistency
would cause more harm than good, and the symlinks should be "for compatibility
only".

Thoughts?

Samuel