| 30 Jun 2026 |
 ElvishJerricco | Why is this bad? What does bootctl have to do if we don't think we need an update? And why would using varlink fix things? | 15:09:57 |
 K900 | Because bootctl already has a code path for "update only if necessary" | 15:10:20 |
| K900 | And that's something it knows how to do better than us | 15:10:32 |
| ElvishJerricco | right but it exits with failure if that happens | 15:10:38 |
| K900 | And varlink is seemingly the only way for an outside observer to differentiate "failed to do a thing" and "didn't need to do anything" | 15:10:56 |
| ElvishJerricco | ooooh I see | 15:11:10 |
| K900 | Because via varlink it returns the right exit code for the latter | 15:11:13 |
| ElvishJerricco | I was just going to patch systemd to add a bootctl check command | 15:11:34 |
| K900 | Unfortunately, it only works when there is a varlink | 15:11:38 |
| ElvishJerricco | because that should exist | 15:11:41 |
| K900 | In reply to @elvishjerricco:matrix.org
I was just going to patch systemd to add a bootctl check command You can patch it to instead return a better exit code | 15:11:49 |
| K900 | For update | 15:11:51 |
| K900 | But then people will complain probably | 15:12:05 |
| K900 | But yes initially I thought it broke because update started returning 1 on nothing to do | 15:12:33 |
| K900 | But turns out that's always been there | 15:12:38 |
| K900 | And we're calling update when we shouldn't | 15:12:48 |
| K900 | But ideally we'd just call update and it'll tell us if it did nothing | 15:12:59 |
| K900 | And then we can probably just drop all the bootctl status parsing nonsense | 15:14:09 |
| ElvishJerricco | yea so options are: 1) fix our check so it doesn't look at that fallback binary, 2) patch bootctl to have a check command 3) patch bootctl update to let you know if it did nothing, but that seems less generally useful than having check too, 4) use varlink to tell the same thing, but that won't work in chroot | 15:14:23 |
| K900 | We just call varlink if it exists and otherwise we call update --graceful | 15:14:29 |
| ElvishJerricco | oh | 15:14:41 |
| K900 | In chroot it never exits 1 | 15:14:42 |
| ElvishJerricco | that's a good point | 15:14:43 |
| K900 | Because it's graceful | 15:14:46 |
| ElvishJerricco | graceful on the fallback | 15:14:49 |
| K900 | Because it's a stupid chroot check | 15:14:53 |
| ElvishJerricco | good idea | 15:14:55 |
| K900 | So I think varlink and fall back to update --graceful is noop for chroots | 15:15:14 |
| ElvishJerricco | I mean, bootctl is the kinda tool where I'm not happy for it to require varlink. So I don't actually like us using the varlink | 15:15:23 |
| K900 | And improvement for most other things | 15:15:24 |
