[systemd-devel] Query regarding "EnvironmentFile"

[Jóhann B. Guðmundsson]

On 12/21/2015 04:36 PM, Michael Biebl wrote:
> 2015-12-21 17:30 GMT+01:00 Jóhann B. Guðmundsson <johannbg at gmail.com>:
>> It's an added work to add the environmental line to begin with and it's an
> That would be done once, by upstream ideally. The work would be negligible.

Still an added work either upstream/downstream + these still have to be 
maintained/updated which people often neglect to take into consideration.

>
>> equal amount of work for administrators to change the environmental line or
>> the Exec= line(s) so the benefit is none
> That is not true when considering upgrades.

You are right but for that particular feature of systemd it's a question 
for distribution/upstream whether it should not that it can.

Transparently updating type unit files on update/upgrades can break 
running system/setups ( especially when it comes down to the security 
options that systemd provides being added to those type unit files, 
people have a hard time getting those right in general let alone taking 
into considerations all the variants of setups out in the wild ) just 
like upstream changes in configuration files for a set of 
daemon/services ( httpd 2.2 vs 2.4 for example ).

Administrators on these parts want to have full control over their 
systems since each downtime can cost significant amount of money for 
their company or clients of their company so this feature is not even 
considered a feature while hobby administrators, devops and plain end 
users might consider this a feature since downtime is irrelevant or less 
important to them and does not cost them money or even their job if it 
happens.

Bottom line some people look at what you pointed out as con for using 
environment to handle daemons startup options not as a feature while 
others might.

>
>> With environmental files administrators will have to keep tabs on two files
> I specifically didn't talk about EnvironmentFile=, but Environment=

Right I was just pointing out that if the intent is to support multiple 
init system then you must use EnvironmentFile=not Environment= to 
achieve that goal.

JBG