[systemd-devel] documentation and required version

[Lennart Poettering]

On Wed, 30.07.14 13:21, Reindl Harald (h.reindl at thelounge.net) wrote:

> http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.exec.html
> 
> such error messages caused by list all sort of options
> without any information when they where introduced are
> really annoying - the docs should clearly say the minimum
> required systemd version and the more options are added
> the more important is that
> 
> Jul 30 13:17:09 rh systemd[1]: [/usr/lib/systemd/system/mysqld.service:10] Unknown lvalue 'RuntimeDirectory' in
> section 'Service'
> Jul 30 13:17:09 rh systemd[1]: [/usr/lib/systemd/system/mysqld.service:11] Unknown lvalue 'RuntimeDirectoryMode' in
> section 'Service

I am a bit conservative about doing this, since it would actually make
the man pages much larger if we want this to be comprehensive. Also, I
really don't want to litter the normal man pages with so much
information about possibly pre-historical versions of systemd. It
clutters the view, and makes people assume they would have to care for
the old versions all times. I mean, currently many of the pages shipped
with the "manpages" packages contain information about what feature is
supported in 1.x kernels or in glibc < 2, and stuff. And I really never
ever want to be in the business of listing such cruft.

What I'd be open to is if we keep this relatively isolated, strictly
automatically generated and with a cutoff point where all versions that
were released let's say 2y ago are subsumed under a single version. It
shouldn't be too hard to write a script that automatically generates
something like a minimal version of systemd.directives(7), that is
enriched with data from the git history or so, and simply says "Since
189" or so, for each of the configuration options.

Happy to take a clean patch for something like that.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering, Red Hat