[systemd-devel] Arbitrary restrictions (e.g. for RuntimeDirectory)

[Ulrich Windl]

Hi!

I had to subscribe to this list, even though I'm no systemd fan. Still I'll have to deal with it as the distribution we use switched to systemd...

I'm porting my LSB code to systemd, and I'm having some trouble. Cause of the trouble (and possible reason for systemd's unpopularity) seems to be rather arbitrary restrictions without reasoning (which is completely against the GNU spirit of seeking for limitless software).

To be concrete: Why isn't it allowed to use an absolute path for RuntimeDirectory, and wy isn't even a relative path allowed? In my case I have a multi-instance daemon, where the instances can be zero to many. To avoid namespace conflicts, I created a /var/run/<my_pkg> directroy where all the instances put their stuff (in separate directories each)

Trying "RuntimeDirectory=<my_pkg>/%i" inside <my_pkg>@.service isn't "accepted". Still the instances start, can be checked and stopped, but there is a message when stopped saying
systemd[1]: [/usr/lib/systemd/system/<my_pkg>@.service:12] Runtime directory is not valid, ignoring assignment: <my_pkg>/%i

As "mkdir -p" exists for at least 25 years, I wonder what this is all about.

Despite of that I'm missing a "systemctl validate ..." command. That way I wouldn't need to execute start, status, stop, just to find out that some settings are rejected.

Regards,
Ulrich