The behaviour of systemctl.

[Aaron Sowry]

On Sat, Jun 18, 2011 at 05:25:36PM +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> You know, I'd prefer if you take up your beef with "ls" first. Have you
> ever compared the output of "ls" and of "ls | cat"? And that's just the
> most obvious case.

Yes, but the difference here is that "ls" does not re-implement something that
is already available at the command line.

> Generating slightly different output on a tty than when used in another
> way is deeply rooted in Linux heritage. Autopaging is just a small step
> forward in that area.

Not sure I agree, but okay.

> And how does that matter for Fedora?

It doesn't I guess, but are you writing systemd for Fedora, or as a general
replacement for SysV init?

> > Is util-linux a systemd dependency?
> 
> Yes, absolutely. systemd depends on util-linux for the gettys, for fsck,
> for mount, for umount, for swapoff, for swapon -- all these commands are
> more than just wrappers around kernel functionality and are pretty much
> the Linux API for the respective functionality.

Sure, but as far as I can tell, util-linux is not in the dependency list.

> Hmm? Implicit --full when using a pager has been the default since quite
> some time in systemd.

Strange - I'm not seeing it in systemd-units-26-3.fc15.x86_64.

> > Not really. All other administrators use exactly the same tools I do, very few
> > of which behave like systemctl. Having to deal with command-specific behaviour
> > only makes it more difficult to learn a new tool.
> 
> Yupp, as I see it it eases an administrator's life.
> 
> I guess we just have to agree to disagree on this, and leave it at
> this. Sorry if that is disappointing.

It is disappointing. Specifics aside, my general point is that administrators
don't need hand-holding and understand that there are pagers available for use
outside of the program itself. Imposing behaviour on users only results in the
problems I've pointed out previously - inconsistent output, inconsistent
behaviour, additional code, additional dependencies, unnecessary flags, learning
curve, non-portability, and so on ad nauseum. I'd love to see it change, I'd
even submit a patch but I'm afraid it would fall on deaf ears. Thanks for taking
the time to respond, anyway.

/Aaron
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