Systemd Preset Policy

[Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek]

On Sun, Jul 26, 2015 at 08:05:08AM -0400, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 25, 2015 at 8:28 PM, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek
> <zbyszek at in.waw.pl> wrote:
> > On Sat, Jul 25, 2015 at 06:06:42PM -0600, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> >> On Sat, 25 Jul 2015 23:56:07 +0000
> >> Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek <zbyszek at in.waw.pl> wrote:
> >>
> >> > On Sat, Jul 25, 2015 at 10:41:55PM +0100, Sérgio Basto wrote:
> >> > > The packages that I'm concerned about are in a third party repo .
> >> > > How we may workaround this ? is to add one file
> >> > > in /usr/lib/systemd/system-preset/ ?
> >> > Yes, that's one option. I think that it's fairly reasoanble in case
> >> > of a third-party low-level service like vboxservice.service.
> >>
> >> I would think the third party might ship their own presets in their
> >> release package or the like?
> > In the release package or even in the package containing the service
> > itself. That's the way I understood what Sérgio wrote.
> >
> > (Either way, the preset file can be easily overriden by the
> > administartor by adding a file with the same name in /etc,
> > or by including a file with sorts earlier.)
> >
> > Zbyszek
> 
> It is the sort of eleventh hour re-arrangement of existing defaults
> that make people very, very leery of anything involving systemd. The
> change may well be worth doing, but "oh, you can just go fix that
> yourself with a workaround" accumulates into a lot of work very
> quickly, and it makes 3rd party integration for multiple platforms
> that extra bit more difficult.
11th hour — in what timezone? ;) There's nothing urgent about this at
all. Let me reiterate: Fedora decided that Fedora packages will use
this mechanism to decide which services are enabled by default.
The old mechanism where the package hardcodes that setting still
works, will continue to work, and is available to any package.

Maybe it wasn't clear from the discussion above: for external packages
which can only be installed explicitly (not through dependencies)
always starting the service on installation is reasonable. So
they *can* add preset support, but don't *have* to.

Zbyszek