Hi everybody, It seems like systemd now provides a target that is intended to gather all timers supposed to be activated after boot. From man 7 systemd.special:
timers.target A special target unit that sets up all timer units (see systemd.timer(5) for details) that shall be active after boot. It is recommended that timer units installed by applications get pulled in via Wants= dependencies from this unit. This is best configured via WantedBy=timers.target in the timer unit's "[Install]" section.
systemd package itself provides two timers, /usr/lib/systemd/system/systemd-readahead-done.timer and /usr/lib/systemd/system/systemd-tmpfiles-clean.timer, the latter being statically enabled in the "new" /usr/lib/systemd/system/timers.target.wants directory. Five other packages in base group provide systemd timers: logrotate, man-db, mdadm, shadow and util-linux. I didn't manage to use pkgfile to get this list (globbing and regex switches didn't help, dunno why), so I only counted .timer files present in /usr/lib/systemd/system/. $ pacman -Qo /usr/lib/systemd/system/*.timer /usr/lib/systemd/system/fstrim.timer is owned by util-linux 2.25.1-1 /usr/lib/systemd/system/logrotate.timer is owned by logrotate 3.8.7-3 /usr/lib/systemd/system/man-db.timer is owned by man-db 2.6.7.1-1 /usr/lib/systemd/system/mdadm-last-resort@.timer is owned by mdadm 3.3.1-2 /usr/lib/systemd/system/shadow.timer is owned by shadow 4.2.1-1 /usr/lib/systemd/system/systemd-readahead-done.timer is owned by systemd 216-3 /usr/lib/systemd/system/systemd-tmpfiles-clean.timer is owned by systemd 216-3 Currently, three timers are statically enabled via symlinks in /usr/lib/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/ after install (logrotate.timer, man-db.timer and shadow.timer), while as already said systemd-tmpfiles-clean.timer is statically enabled via a symlink in /usr/lib/systemd/system/timers.target.wants/ (seemingly respecting new practice). On the other hand, util-linux' fstrim.timer, when enabled via systemctl, gets symlinked in /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/. Other packages not part of base like extra/pkgstats or extra/mlocate also provide timers that once enabled, get symlinked to /usr/lib/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/. So AFAICT, there are quite some discrepancies concerning how systemd timers are implemented. I'd like to discuss whether Arch should switch default timers target for packages in base group from multi-user.target to timers.target, possibly doing so for other packages in official repos. Cheers, Neitsab