The only argument I see in favour of varlink is the ease of debugging, and this should never being an argument in a technical decision.
When your stuff is running in “prod”, your " ease of debugging" is thrown away, but the system continue to suffer.
Json for IPC is a terrible idea.
Using json for IPC but a binary format for log files sounds insane to me, but alright.
So, Poettering wants to make life difficult for everyone using something other than his precious again by transitioning from the normal standard for IPC to something hardly anyone has ever heard of or uses that’s based on JSON? Seriously? 🤢
It’s not just “hardly anyone,” it’s “literally no one.” Varlink was invented by the systemd developers out of whole cloth specifically for this purpose.
This has always been the whole point behind the Trojan Horse that is systemd. Now that Poettering/Red Hat control the entire userspace across virtually all distros, he/they can use it as a vehicle to force all of them to adopt whatever bullshit he thinks of next.
This is what the Linux ecosystem gave away when they tossed their simple init system to adopt the admittedly convenient solution that is systemd. But in reality, the best solution was always to drop
init, and instead replace it with an alternative that was still simple to replace if the need should arise. But now that everyone is stuck on systemd, they’re all at the mercy of Poettering’s Next Stupid Idea.Convenience comes at a price. systemd is the Google Chrome of Linux userspace. Get out while you can.
Jesus fucking Christ, why is everything a war? Its so fucking exhausting.
