[systemd-devel] Unwants

[Lennart Poettering]

On Thu, 22.01.15 15:16, Dimitri John Ledkov (dimitri.j.ledkov at intel.com) wrote:

> On 22 January 2015 at 14:46, Michael Biebl <mbiebl at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 2015-01-22 15:08 GMT+01:00 Dimitri John Ledkov <dimitri.j.ledkov at intel.com>:
> >> At the moment, I'm looking at packaging symlinks in .wants directories
> >> under /usr and then allow to uninstall such a package as a means to
> >> override the default config. Since I would like to update how the
> >> default config is setup, without doing in /etc where I'd have to
> >> answer "is this my old config, or user modified it and I shouldn't
> >> touch it"
> >
> > That's indeed a tough problem. The upstream recommendation is, to run
> > "systemctl preset" during the initial installation.
> > If there are changes to the default in the unit files, those changes
> > are *not* applied on package upgrades.
> 
> Presets are good, however they do not have a format to specify extra
> .wants and .requires. And in my case unwants and unrequires.

Extra .wants and .requires? What would those entail? I mean, the unit
files can store extra deps in their [Install] section...

> So at the moment I'm playing around with - unconditionally running
> preset on my preset file, and directing users to write (override) own
> preset file in /etc/systemd/system-preset if they want to modify the
> default proposed integration.
> 
> > I don't think that's a particularly compelling solution.
> >
> > In Debian, we introduced a helper called i-s-h [1], which keeps some
> > additional state and tries to apply such changes on updates.
> >
> 
> Well, if "systemctl enable/disable/add-requires/add-wants" would write
> things into /etc/systemd/system-preset instead of modifying things in
> /etc, then it would be alright. As essentially the full set of presets
> would be the state of system-defaults + user overrides.
> 
> Also it seems like preset is a bit of templating hack at the moment,
> as they are not loaded by systemd but rarther are simply used to
> generate files/symlinks on disk under /etc.

I don't follow. Presets are the recommended vendor configuration, and
as such static and immutable. It is supposed to be applied once,
during first installation of a pacakge. From that point on things are
user configuration and presets will not be applied.

Patching preset files during runtime is really against what they were
designed for.

Quite frankly, I have trouble following at all what is being attempted
here...

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering, Red Hat