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

[Bill Nottingham]

Lennart Poettering (mzerqung at 0pointer.de) said: 
> > Does it pull this from inittab if there's no other configuration for
> > this?
> 
> Ok. You got me on this one. Systemd does actually not parse the
> inittab. That cruft looked a bit too ugly and clumsy and old for us to
> support.
> 
> However, we have added replcacements for everything is was used
> for. i.e. the gettys are started now via normal services.
> 
> The replacement for the default runlevel stuff is a symlink in
> /etc/systemd/system. You could do this:
> 
> /etc/systemd/system/default.target → /lib/systemd/system/multi-user.target
> 
> to avoid the graphical UI, and boot into the text console only
> (i.e. much like the old runlevel 3)
> 
> Or you could do this:
> 
> /etc/systemd/system/default.target → /lib/systemd/system/graphical.target
> 
> to boot into the graphical stuff by default. This is the default as we
> package it.
> 
> And the admin could even define additional targets, to achieve different
> system profiles he can boot into or switch forth and back to and from,
> and give it arbitrary names, and even pull in any of the targets we ship
> by default.

The issue is that this is a behavior change (from both sysvinit and upstart)
that will need code to be handled properly in other packages. Anaconda,
at least, will need to be patched to set the default bootup target
differently depending on which init system it's installing, which
is kind of ugly.

If I must ask, what's gained by the change in implementation and
nomenclature here? All of these existed before as runlevels, and at least
with sysvinit, the administrator could define their own custom ones.

Bill