[systemd-devel] sysv-generator: doesn't handle /etc/insserv/overrides or /etc/chkconfig.d

[Dimitri John Ledkov]

On 16 February 2015 at 14:35, Christian Seiler <christian at iwakd.de> wrote:
> Am 2015-02-16 13:59, schrieb Lennart Poettering:
>>>
>>> You couldn't override init scripts that way - if you wanted to do that,
>>> you'd have to replace them completely. But if you just want to alter
>>> (or even specify for the first time for certain third-party scripts)
>>> dependency information but keep getting updates for the init script
>>> from the software vendor, this was really, really useful.
>>
>>
>> Since I never heard anyone asking for this, I doubt it was really that
>> useful in real life...
>
>
> Understanding that you don't want to accept this kind of patch, I do
> want to disagree here vehemently. On sysvinit systems I've used that
> a LOT of times to modify init scripts, both from the distribution and
> from third parties. Scripts from the distribution mainly to add some
> dependencies due to local configuration, but third-party scripts
> because those had either completely broken LSB headers or even
> non-existent ones. So at least from my experience, this feature was
> _immensely_ useful. And if you search for "insserv/overrides" in your
> favorite search engine, you'll find that there are enough hits there
> to see that I'm not the only one.
>
> (Now obviously, you don't want to support it, so I'll move on, but I
> did want to disagree with the assertion that it wasn't useful.)

It is likely that things/scripts that were modified at the time via
such overrides, have systemd units today.
Merging this support today, will land in stable "enterprisy" releases
in 1-2 years time.
By that time, upgrades to that future release is even more likely to
have been moved on to systemd units - or alternative technologies /
implementations all together.
I believe that your concerns and points are valid, but the timing to
implement/merge/support such a use-case upstream is past the point of
no return.
Systems that will upgrade to systemd 219+ will be overwhelmingly from
earlier systemd releases, or at best mixtures of (degrees of) upstart
and/or SysV compliant initscript (with dependencies) in an enforcing
mode.

If you have a strong desire for such a feature, and I presume in
current stable distributions, rather than future stables. It is best
to factor it out into a stand-alone, portable across older systemd
releases, generator, and ship it as stand-alone utility / project that
people can install as an addon to regain compat for that
functionality. And hopefully people will have no need for it in the
stable distros everyone will ship in 2017 onwards.

-- 
Regards,

Dimitri.

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