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

Stephen John Smoogen smooge at gmail.com
Fri Jul 23 00:16:50 UTC 2010


On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 18:06, Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net> wrote:
> Once upon a time, Lennart Poettering <mzerqung at 0pointer.de> said:
>> Same with systemd. If you use "systemctl status foo.service" the output
>> is human readable. If it is "systemctl show foo.service" it is computer
>> parsable. Just a slightly different command of the systemctl tool.
>
> Again: this is confusing!  There should be one (and only one) command to
> show information.  It should accept arguments to modify that output,
> e.g. default to brief info, -v gets a little more info, -vv gets all
> kinds of info, -p to get "parseable" output (or -f for "formatted"),
> etc.
>
> Having "status" and "show" give the same info in different formats will
> always be confusing.  People won't remember which is which (because the
> works mean similar things in this context) and will run the wrong one
> for what they want about 50% of the time (which will just be
> frustrating).
>

To reword this into a slightly less cranky more useful comment:

My usual dealing with this is that you want one command and an
optional flag to change output.

systemctl status  # awk readable
systemctl status --human # human readable

The general rule to remember is that the person you are going to deal
with is going to be tired, grumpy, and pissed off. Commands need to be
simple to remember and easy to script first.


-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
“The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance.”
Randy Nelson, President of Pixar University.
"We have a strategic plan. It's called doing things.""
— Herb Kelleher, founder Southwest Airlines


More information about the devel mailing list