[systemd-devel] [PATCH] systemctl: allow to change the default target without the --force switch

[Lennart Poettering]

On Mon, 14.04.14 01:07, Djalal Harouni (tixxdz at opendz.org) wrote:

> Currently "systemctl set-default" will fail to change the default target
> due to the 'default.target' being a symlink which is always the case.

Humm, no? Normally default.target should not exist in /etc, only in
/usr. This means "systemctl set-default" should just work if it is run
on a pristine system, and only requires --force if there's already user
configuration in place that is conflicting.

> To work around this, the user must specify the "--force" switch to be
> able to overwrite the existing symlink.
> 
> This is clearly a regression that was introduced by commit  718db96199e
> since it worked before without the "--force" switch and the man pages do
> not mention that you need to specify it. It is expected that this is a
> symlink.
> 
> So just explicity set the force flag to make it work again.
> 
> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=76623

Hmm, I find the behaviour before this patch actually more sensible,
since it treats this symlink like any other symlink we create/remove in
install.c. It appears more like a issue of printing a nice error message
that informs the user that "--force" might be a good idea to use when
this happens...

But anyway, my opinion on this isn't very strong, so I am going to leave
this patch as is.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering, Red Hat