[systemd-devel] why does nofail imply no After= in /etc/fstab

[Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek]

On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 03:51:02PM +0100, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Wed, 15.01.14 20:20, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek (zbyszek at in.waw.pl) wrote:
> 
> > I was a bit surprised that for mount points the dependency
> > Before=local-fs.target is only added when nofail is not used.
> > This seems to be a concious decision (added by Lennart in
> > 155da457, and then survived all the refactorings by Tom
> > and Thomas...). Do we still want this behaviour?
> 
> Well, "nofail" means that we shouldn't bother if the device doesn't show
> up at boot. Now, if we add "After=" for it there, then we will time-out
> on it (though not fail) if something else pulls it in.
> 
> I figure this is a question what nofail really should mean: "never wait
> for it, never fail for it" (which is the status quo), or just "usually
> don't wait, never fail for it" (which would be the change if we added
> After= in). I am tempted to say that the status quo is more likely what
> people would expect, no?
The problem is that with current boot speeds, "usually don't wait" means
that it shows up at some "upredictable" time. With a bit of luck, users
might be able to log in before such mount points which are declared in
/etc/fstab are mounted. I think that's unexpected, because it goes againt
the general rule that things declared in /etc/fstab (w/o automount or noauto)
are mounted at boot.

I'd prefer to keep things orthogonal. This feels like an "optimization"
that it user visible. We should rather encourage people to use automounts
if the don't want to wait for the mountpoint to come up.

Zbyszek