[systemd-devel] Pre-installed portable services ?

[Luca Boccassi]

On Tue, 21 Sept 2021 at 09:30, Umut Tezduyar Lindskog
<Umut.Tezduyar at axis.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> On 2021-09-20, 5:19 PM, "Lennart Poettering" <lennart at poettering.net> wrote:
>
>     On Mo, 20.09.21 11:24, Umut Tezduyar Lindskog (Umut.Tezduyar at axis.com) wrote:
>
>     > Hi. Is there such thing as “pre-installed” portable services? If
>     > not, what is the best way to achieve it. One option can be to place
>     > the files that “attach” command creates on the distro but I am
>     > worried that the files might be outdated depending on the systemd
>     > version the distro is shipped.
>
>     What do you mean by "pre-installed" precisely?
>
>     I mean, portable services can be dropped into /usr/lib/portables/,
>     i.e. a dir that typically is included in the base OS image? (As
>     opposed to /var/lib/portables/, where they are usually dropped, given
>     they should be able to be added anytime).
>
>     Or do you mean that they are also "pre-attached" and "pre-enabled"? If
>     you want that you could either call "portablectl attach" at boot, or
>     just package the symlinks/files the call creates.
>
> This.
>
> Seems like 20-portable.conf is created not symbol linked. If we package the files ourself, then we need to make sure they are up to date as new versions of systemd might tweak them. I guess.
>
>     We could also add some special dirs that may contain images we'll
>     automatically attach + enable during boot as we discover them. That'd
>     be a new feature though.
>
> Cool! If the feature is not there by the time we put our hands on portable services, we would send a patch upstream.
>
> Thanks for your feedback.

Well we should have enough tooling already for image builds to make
this seamless, without needing runtime action, no? In my experience of
image building it's much easier to delegate as much as possible to
build time, than runtime, as it's much easier to validate and debug.