[arch-dev-public] Switching to systemd by default in new installations

[Tom Gundersen]

On Sun, Oct 7, 2012 at 7:54 PM, Dave Reisner <d at falconindy.com> wrote:
> Once upon a time, systemd was installed to /bin, and we told people to
> use init=/bin/systemd. It seemed like the logical thing to do ;). This
> entirely predates the /usr merge and we had no idea that the binary was
> going to move to {,/usr}/lib. We had no idea this was coming, but I've
> opposed to getting rid of it because it doesn't cost us a whole lot. I
> think this is an excellent time to remove it.

Maybe even better would be to do this once everyone has been using
systemd-sysvcompat for a long time, and the advice about using
init=/bin/systemd is long forgotten. I don't see the rush to remove
the symlink, it will very likely cause boot problems for lots of
people.

>> > This "compatability" layer is still a mess with packages shipping rc.d
>> > files which don't match up with the unit file name. I proposed a
>> > solution for this in initscripts that involved keeping a static list of
>> > exceptions in arch-daemons rather than peppering packages with symlinks
>> > full of lies, and it appears that nothing has been done yet. This
>> > _must_ to be fixed first.
>>
>> In the current status, only a small number of people will even need it,
>> and they will only specify services which do not have a unit at all -
>> and nothing is broken there. I don't really see the problem - can't we
>> expect our users to gradually remove the compatibility DAEMONS over
>> time? Do we really have to hold their hands?
>
> Apparently we do. I've been against the generator from the start. Force
> things to break, and let people who actually care fix them. At a
> minimum, we realy need to get rid of the broken symlinks that we're
> shipping. You can start/stop/status them by the symlink name, but you
> can't enable them, and the message is totally non-descript.

I'm not a huge fan of just letting lots of stuff break. However, I
agree that the symlink situation is unacceptable and I think the best
solution would be to just remove all the symlinks and tell people to
only put stuff in DAEMONS that don't have systemd services.

At worst this might mean that some things are started twice, probably
one of the two instances will fail and with the right advice in a news
item I don't think it is too much too expect our users to figure out
that they just need to remove the relevant DAEMONS from rc.conf.

-t