[systemd-devel] Unwants

[Dimitri John Ledkov]

On 22 January 2015 at 14:46, Michael Biebl <mbiebl at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2015-01-22 15:08 GMT+01:00 Dimitri John Ledkov <dimitri.j.ledkov at intel.com>:
>> At the moment, I'm looking at packaging symlinks in .wants directories
>> under /usr and then allow to uninstall such a package as a means to
>> override the default config. Since I would like to update how the
>> default config is setup, without doing in /etc where I'd have to
>> answer "is this my old config, or user modified it and I shouldn't
>> touch it"
>
> That's indeed a tough problem. The upstream recommendation is, to run
> "systemctl preset" during the initial installation.
> If there are changes to the default in the unit files, those changes
> are *not* applied on package upgrades.
>

Presets are good, however they do not have a format to specify extra
.wants and .requires. And in my case unwants and unrequires.

So at the moment I'm playing around with - unconditionally running
preset on my preset file, and directing users to write (override) own
preset file in /etc/systemd/system-preset if they want to modify the
default proposed integration.

> I don't think that's a particularly compelling solution.
>
> In Debian, we introduced a helper called i-s-h [1], which keeps some
> additional state and tries to apply such changes on updates.
>

Well, if "systemctl enable/disable/add-requires/add-wants" would write
things into /etc/systemd/system-preset instead of modifying things in
/etc, then it would be alright. As essentially the full set of presets
would be the state of system-defaults + user overrides.

Also it seems like preset is a bit of templating hack at the moment,
as they are not loaded by systemd but rarther are simply used to
generate files/symlinks on disk under /etc.

-- 
Regards,

Dimitri.

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