Bug#941198: In support of mandatory unit files

[Tobias Frost <tobi@coldtobi.de>]

On Wed, Dec 04, 2019 at 07:03:09PM +0100, Simon Richter wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> chiming in as I've been pointed to this bug: I agree with Ansgar in that
> adding unit files does not hurt sysvinit support in the least, provided we
> still get to ignore them.
> 
> I'd even be in favour of making them mandatory (i.e. upgrading the lintian
> warning to an error), and I don't see how the GR outcome would affect the
> question of whether we want to ship unit files in packages, so I'd be fine
> with going ahead with this change even while the GR is still running.
> 
> As long as we support sysv-rc, init scripts will have to remain mandatory
> as well, though.
> 
> IMO, an ideal outcome would be that systemd can completely ignore any init
> scripts from Debian packages, i.e. the compatibility generator, if
> installed, would only have to generate units for init scripts that didn't
> come from a package, and default installations would not include this
> generator.

JFTR, I maintain gmedia-resurrect and in this package I failed despite trying
to create a systemd unit file with equal functinality as the init.d script*.
So for this package  the proposoal would lead to regressions for the users.
 
> The same should be done for cron files vs timer units -- ideally, we'd get
> to a state where cron files can be completely ignored by systemd because it
> is a bug to not have a timer unit with the same settings. That would allow
> systemd users to get rid of the spurious wakeups as well, which I'd
> consider a major win.
> 
>    Simon

* I do not have currently the amount of spoons avialable to explain the details,
but it has to do with the confile in /etc/default needed to be read by the unit
file and parsed into daemon parameters.