[systemd-devel] Dropping SysV init script support? (was: systemd prerelease 254-rc3)

[Luca Boccassi]

On Mon, 24 Jul 2023 at 17:57, Neal Gompa <ngompa13 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Jul 24, 2023 at 11:40 AM Luca Boccassi <luca.boccassi at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Mon, 24 Jul 2023 at 16:30, Neal Gompa <ngompa13 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > On Mon, Jul 24, 2023 at 9:00 AM systemd tag bot
> > > <donotreply-systemd-tag at refi64.com> wrote:
> > > >
> > > >         * Support for System V service scripts is now deprecated and will be
> > > >           removed in a future release. Please make sure to update your software
> > > >           *now* to include a native systemd unit file instead of a legacy
> > > >           System V script to retain compatibility with future systemd releases.
> > > >
> > >
> > > What's driving this change? Already distributions have to manage the
> > > code that integrates the sysv init script support into systemd (such
> > > as chkconfig(8) and debian's systemd-sysv-install for update-rc.d(8)).
> > >
> > > To the best of my knowledge, the sysv support code actually *in*
> > > systemd is mostly around the systemd-sysv-generator that creates
> > > transient units to express dependencies. There's also the small bits
> > > in systemctl(1) itself for triggering the generation of those units.
> > >
> > > Is this something that could be externalized into a separate project
> > > and framework like systemd-initctl was? Perhaps it could even be a
> > > pattern for others to implement translation for their own things to
> > > systemd (e.g. runit, et al).
> >
> > Why not just add a unit where it's missing? It's been a decade or so,
> > most things should be in place now
>
> Because I don't necessarily control what other people do. And there's
> still a very long tail of software out there that only ships a
> sysvinit script. There are still people upgrading from RHEL 5/6, SLE
> 11, or Ubuntu 14.04 too. The software they bring along that they can't
> change would still be using sysvinit scripts.

This is not going to retroactively remove it though? So RHEL6 will
still have it and so on. And when porting to different, more recent
LTS distributions, there will be many other changes to do, adding a 3
lines unit file is likely going to be one of the easiest?