[systemd-devel] Installing user unit files.

[Rüdiger Sonderfeld]

On Monday 08 December 2014 19:40:14 Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek wrote:
> This destination must be know to systemd. So anything generic like ~/usr
> is unlikely to work, unless systemd is modified to check that directory too.
> When installed as a user, it should go to $HOME/.local/share/systemd/user/.
> Please see [1] for an up-to-date list of directories where user units are
> loaded from. The ones in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME are for user overrides, so
> .local/share/ seems the most appropriate.
> 
> [1]
> http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.unit.html#Unit%20Lo
> ad%20Path

It would then be up to the user to either adjust the install path or copy the 
file or adjust their systemd configuration.  But it would avoid the trouble of 
writing outside the user specified $prefix.

The options could be:

- prefix (meaning install it to the datadir)
- auto (meaning install it to whatever pkg-config says)
- no (don't install it)
- <path> (install it to that path)

With prefix being the default.  That would probably be the least surprising 
way for users.  But of course it would make the feature a bit harder to 
discover and require the user to do additional steps during installation and 
potentially during removal as well.

Regards,
Rüdiger