[HEADS-UP] systemd for F14 - the next steps

[Bill Nottingham]

Lennart Poettering (mzerqung at 0pointer.de) said: 
> Since the acceptance by FESCO it has been added to Rawhide together with
> patched or updated versions of a few related packages. However, what has
> not been done so far is making it the default in Rawhide. So far it does
> not "Obsolete" Upstart yet, just "Conflicts" with it. With this mail I
> want to notify everybody that I am planning to do this change very soon
> now (tomorrow?). Then, systemd will be pulled in onto your rawhide
> system and is used exclusively for booting (so far, you can still choose
> between it and upstart in grub, with a default on upstart), and problems
> booting should be reported to systemd in rhbz then.

This seems a little backwards. If we want to support both, then we need
to just leave it as 'Conflicts', and we'll just flip the default in
comps. By marking it as 'Obsoletes', you effectively make it impossible
to still boot with upstart, as it will be removed in any yum update.

> d) There's one thing that is not directly related to systemd but which
> I'd really like to see done at the same time: moving /var/lock and
> /var/run to tmpfs, like suse and ubuntu already did it. The changes
> necessary should be small, but probably in a non-trivial number of
> packages: each mention of /var/run in the .spec files needs to be
> %ghosted. Also, some minimal changes to rc.sysinit need to be done, so
> that the dirs are mounted (this could be done by systemd too, in case we
> get the sysinit split hhoyer started to work on done before
> F14). Finally, there might be a few packages which start to act confused
> if their directories beneath /var/run is go away on reboot. But these
> problems should already have been fixed by the Ubuntuans and Suses of
> this world for us. It would be really great if somebody would volunteer
> for this and go through the packages to add %ghost everywhere and ensure
> otherwise this works out. The ubuntu and suse folks might have some
> docs around with more ideas about this.

I suspect the biggest issue here is confined daemons, as they may
not have permissions to create their own directories in /var/run or
/var/lock once they've been started. Unfortunately, it's the sort of
flag day that we really can't do unless everything in our tree is fixed.

Bill