Comment by josteink
2 days ago
Most systemd-projects have a name which immediately shouts out what it does, so you can easily tell if it is relevant for your needs or not.
systemd-nspawn is probably the only project without such a name, so most people don't know about it, nor what it does, and therefore never looks any more into it.
And that's a shame really, because it's fantastic technology.
How so? nspawn means spawn a process in a new namespace, which is... exactly what it does. The problem isn't with systemd-nspawn, the problem is with containers, because the vast majority of devs have no idea that containers are just scripts to set up Linux namespaces.
> because the vast majority of devs have no idea that containers are just scripts to set up Linux namespaces.
That’s IMO framing things a bit backwards.
That’s how containers are implemented… today. on Linux. On Windows it’s completely different. On MacOS it’s completely different again.
And what makes you think «namespaces» are a term unique to containers? It’s used throughout tech for a million other platforms too.
Containers however is a well defined concept, regardless of how they are implemented today, and on one platform only.
systemd would probably see more use of their container-platform if they put «container» in the name, that much seems obvious to me.
> systemd-nspawn is probably the only project without such a name
Add sd-tmpfiles to the list IMO. While it still create and manages temporary files its more managing almost any type of system file. From creating them to managing their permissions or making symlinks when needed.
I am a strong advocator of renaming it systemd-sysfiles to match the systemd-sysusers which is somewhat related (e.g. tmpfiles using users created from sysusers). But it probably won't happen for a while if at all due to backwards compat.