Comment by jdub
1 day ago
Sounds like your admin, distro, or the systemd team could pay some attention to systemd-update-done.service
The "can only be used in /etc/fstab" systemd settings are essentially workarounds to do those things via fstab (and workaround fstab related issues) rather than depend on other systemd facilities (c.f. systemd-gpt-auto-generator). From a "what can you do in /etc/fstab without knowing systemd is working behind the scenes" point of view, then yes, systemd units are vastly more configurable.
This service is the standard part of systemd. And my distro is a bog-standard Fedora, with only iSCSI as a complication.
Are you surprised that such a service exists? I certainly was. And doubly so because it has unusual dependency requirements that can easily lead to deadlocks. And yes, this is known, there are open issues, and they are ignored.
> From a "what can you do in /etc/fstab without knowing systemd is working behind the scenes" point of view, then yes, systemd units are vastly more configurable.
No, they are not. In my case, I had to use fstab to be able to specify a retry policy for mount units (SMB shares) because it's intentionally not exposed.
And yes, there's a bug: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/4468 with the expected GTFO resolution: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/4468#issuecomment-...
So there's literally functionality that has been requested by people and it's available only through fstab.