[systemd-devel] getty at .service.m4 and serial-getty at .service.m4

[Andrew Edmunds]

Kay, Lennart,

Kay Sievers wrote:
> Michael, any chance to check if it's possible to avoid the mangling of
> common util-linux tool names, and get a symlink in Debian package?
> After that we can drop the ifdef stuff here.

We can ask, but it has been that way for at least a decade so I'm
guessing it's unlikely to be changed now. See this Debian bug from
2001, marked wontfix.
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=117596

The Debian position actually seems quite logical to me.  Why do Fedora
(and SUSE?) need to ship two different versions of getty and hence
call one of them "alternate getty"?  Other people seem to manage quite
well with only one.

Lennart Poettering wrote
> 2. serial-getty at .service.m4 invokes agetty with option "-s", which
>> seems to have been recently added to agetty at Lennart's request.
>> getty on Debian/Ubuntu doesn't have that option yet and I would
>> guess that other distros may be in the same position. Since ifdefs
>> are needed here anyway, it would be nice to apply that option only
>> to the distros where it currently works.
> 
> Hmm, I'd very much prefer if those distros would upgrade their u-l-ng
> patches instead.

I'm sure they will, and I was only suggesting this as a temporary fix
to be removed again later.  Without "-s", you may need to press Break
to get the correct baud rate but at least a serial console is usable.
 With the "-s", getty just gives a "Usage:" error and respawns
continuously so the serial console is completely non-functional as
things stand.

>> Is there a reason why this applies only to Fedora and Arch?  It seems
>> > appropriate for all users as far as I can see.
> 
> Only Fedora and Arch have rc.local. If you ask me rc.local is something
> that should just die, hence I am very reluctant to support it on any
> more distros than we currently support it on.

Not so.  Here are the contents of /etc/rc.local on an Ubuntu system.
I believe this file comes straight from Debian.

$ cat /etc/rc.local
#!/bin/sh -e
#
# rc.local
#
# This script is executed at the end of each multiuser runlevel.
# Make sure that the script will "exit 0" on success or any other
# value on error.
#
# In order to enable or disable this script just change the execution
# bits.
#
# By default this script does nothing.

exit 0

Anyway, the point of this was only to have getty start late(ish) in
the boot process, after most of the other services that are pulled in
by multi-user.target. Maybe there is a better way to specify this, if
not everyone has rc.local?

Regards,

-- 
Andrew Edmunds
andrew.edmunds at yahoo.com.au