[systemd-devel] [PATCH] man: fix description of sysctl.d order

[Kay Sievers]

On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 12:49 AM, Colin Guthrie <gmane at colin.guthr.ie> wrote:
> 'Twas brillig, and Mantas Mikulėnas at 11/09/13 22:53 did gyre and gimble:
>> systemd-sysctl gives priority to the latest occurence as of commit
>> 04bf3c1a60d82791e0320381e9268f727708f776, but the manpage hasn't been
>> updated for that.
>
> Oh jeez... has the ordering flipped again??
>
> I only just rejigged things for the last time this flipped around and
> now sysctl has decided to buck the trend of the other tools and follow a
> "later file has priority"? I think consistency is good here (even if
> conceptually, a later file overriding an earlier one "feels" better.

Yes, and later-override-earlier is by far the bigger trend. :)

> The order was previously "fixed" such that earlier files win for several
> tools binfmt, tmpfiles

These are multi-options lines which cannot really be merged or
overwritten with multiple lines.

Avoiding conflicting entries seems the best approach here, and the
first-one-wins, the later ones complain sounds like the best approach.

> modules-load

This is just all loaded what's in there, no order, no overwrite, doesn't it?

> and sysctl in
> fabe5c0e5fce730aa66e10a9c4f9fdd443d7aeda back in February.

Sysctl really should be able to handle, and always did in the past,
conflicting entries, and we should not break that stuff. The old tool
just wrote the values multiple times into the kernel.

> Is there a reason why sysctl.conf cannot just be symlinked as
> sysctl.d/0-sysctl.conf rather than 99-sysctl.conf and keep the ordering
> consistent with the other tools?

Where is that defined? /etc/sysctl.conf should not exist, in the ideal case.

Kay