We'd start writing an entry line, then another one, then another one,
and then output the rest of the first one, and then some other random
stuff, and the rest of some other lines... Results were ...eh... random.
Let's define a helper to avoid some of the copy&paste madness, and separate
blocks that output a single line with /**********************************/.
This rework doesn't change what data is written, it only tries to fix the
format of the output. The fact that some entries only write data from
link->network, and some from either link->network or link, some stuff only
for dhpc4 leases while some for both dhpc4 and dhcp6, etc, looks rather
suspicious too, but I didn't touch this.
We would print the error sometimes to stdout and sometimes to stderr. It *is*
useful to get the message if one of the names is not found on the bus to
stdout, so that this shows out in the pager. So let's do verification of args
early to catch invalid arguments, and then if we receive an error over the bus
(most likely that the name is not activatable), let's print to stdout so it
gets paged. E.g. 'busctl tree org.freedesktop.systemd1 org.freedesktop.systemd2'
gives a nicely usable output.
Debian Policy encourages to preserve timestamps whenever possible in the
tarballs, thus stable release updates of systemd usually do not bump NEWS file
timestamp. And thus time-epoch remains the same for the lifetime of a release.
It would be better, if each new stable release rebuild of systemd would bump
the time epoch a bit. But at the same time remain
reproducible. SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH is an environmnet variable defined for this
purpose. Thus if available, prefer that, instead of the NEWS file modification
time.
For example, on Debian/Ubuntu under the reproducible builds the
SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH is set to the timestamp from the packaging metadata, thus it
is incremented on every new stable release update, whilst preserving
reproducible builds capability.
Reference: https://reproducible-builds.org/docs/timestamps/
Lennart Poettering