[systemd-devel] Targeting `systemd --user` for a distributed app without root access: dead-end or neat?

[Michael Chapman]

On Fri, 8 Apr 2016, sbaugh at catern.com wrote:
> Hugues Malphettes <hmalphettes at gmail.com> writes:
[...]
>> So what is the future for this part of systemd?
>
> Not being a systemd developer, I can only hope that systemd --user stays
> around; it's a great movement in the right direction, of putting more
> capability in the hands of unprivileged users. Using it as a component
> in a cluster manager like Fleet is an important part of this.

I too hope that "systemd --user", or something very much like it, stays 
around. I often need to provide unprivileged users the ability to run 
their own long-running processes, and user systemd instances have been 
invaluable for this. In particular, being able to define a unit in 
/etc/systemd/user/ and have any user make use of it at will is 
particularly useful.

If there is just one change I would make, it would be that using systemctl 
without the --system or --user options would contact *both* the system and 
user instances, and allow the user to control any and all units for which 
they have permissions to do so. That would mirror the behaviour of 
journalctl (which shows all log messages you've got permissions to see), 
and it'd be one fewer things I'd need to remind unprivileged users about.

- Michael