[arch-general] about FS#30053 and systemd service/unit file in general

[Tom Gundersen]

On Mon, Jun 11, 2012 at 10:59 AM, solsTiCe d'Hiver
<solstice.dhiver at gmail.com> wrote:
> Systemd is made to boot/init a linux distro. But our distro here is archlinux
> and we are making archlinux package, right ?
> I understand we ship unpatched upstream package, but do we want to ship
> broken package so that they stay untouched ?

The point you are missing is that we want all unit files to one day be
shipped upstream, and to use the upstream versions in our package.
When this eventually happens we don't want the transition from the
"arch version" to the "upstream version" to cause a change in
behavior.

> For me, systemd service/unit file are just meant to be that, tailored to
> archlinux.

Why should starting gpm (or any other daemon) on Arch be different
than on any other distro? We are really not that special that we
need/want to tailor stuff to work with Arch.

Traditionally, every distro has had some version of our
/etc/conf.d/<pkgname>.conf, but all in different locations and using
different formats. This sort of made sense when we had rc scripts, as
editing them was not something an admin would want to do, so a
mechanism to configure them was needed.

However, with systemd service files we want to improve on this
situation: We can get rid of the distro-specific and redundant
configuration files, and rather ship default service files that work
as expected in almost all cases. In the cases that you'd want to
change the behavior, it is as simple as copying the file from /usr to
/etc and editing it there (or, better: use the daemon's native config
file, if available). There might be cases where this does not work and
we NEED an EnvironmentFile=, but unless we know this to be the case we
should avoid it.

> Well, I am a newbie systemd user, his is required that we
> customize every broken systemd service to make it work, so be it.

What I gathered from your message was that what makes the current
service file broken is the missing [Install] section, this should
obviously be fixed. Clearly service files should not be "broken" by
default, so if there are further issues, they should be fixed too.

-t