[arch-general] Arch Linux support in puppet

[Tom Gundersen]

Hi Thomas,

On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 7:07 PM, Thomas S Hatch <thatch45 at 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