Hi Thomas, On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 7:07 PM, Thomas S Hatch <thatch45@gmail.com> wrote:
I think that the unfolding systemd issues here and the fact that we may be required to move to systemd might rewrite this problem altogether, in which case systemd would translate ordering and the order of services as they are placed in the daemons array may be irrelevant.
I will do some more research.
I don't think there are any immediate plans to move Arch to systemd, systemd might soon move to [community] though. However, if you are interested in knowing more about how systemd works on Arch, let me know as I'd be happy to help. There is a wiki here: <http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd>. I'd like to point out one thing which might not be obvious at first glance: systemd has support for the DAEMONS array in rc.conf (partially written by me). However, when this is used, it might happen that systemd will not know the required ordering of daemons, in which case it will fall back to using the order from the DAEMONS array (so if this is incorrect you might get trouble). To be more specific: when systemd has a native service file for a daemon, this will allow it to figure out the dependencies by itself and the position of the service in the DAEMONS array is ignored. If it does not have the service file for a given daemon, it will generate a default one, i.e. it will assume the ordering of the DAEMONS array is correct and order the daemon after the previous non-background daemon in the array. All of this can be avoided by not relying on the DAEMONS array at all, but just adding generic systemd support to Puppet (if it is not there already), and then adding the needed service files to our systemd-arch-units package (the latter is very easy, and I'd be happy to help). Cheers, Tom