Comment by jjgreen

7 hours ago

I've been almost convinced by systemd (and have switched to using it), but God the syntax of those service files is so ugly ...

25 comments

jjgreen

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zamadatix  4 hours ago

Never thought I'd see hackers saying INI format looked ugly of all things. It's basic, sure, but that's a good thing for something meant to be easily editable by hand from any editor. Otherwise, it's just key value pairs in named sections, how ugly can it be about that?

  • jjgreen  4 hours ago

    key-value pairs where the = cannot be surrounded by spaces, so I have to write

      [Service]
  Type=oneshot
  WorkingDirectory={{ home }}/current/
  Environment=RAILS_ENV=production
  ExecStart=/bin/sh -lc "bin/db-backup --verbose"

    which fills me with sadness

    • voxic11  3 hours ago

      Whitespace immediately before or after the equals sign is completely ignored by the parser. Its the standard INI format.

    • yjftsjthsd-h  3 hours ago

      What? You absolutely can have spaces; most of mine look more like

        [Service]
  Type             = oneshot
  WorkingDirectory = %h/current/
  Environment      = RAILS_ENV=production
  ExecStart        = /bin/sh -lc "bin/db-backup --verbose"

      3 replies →

mrweasel  4 hours ago

There's definitely some weirdness to certain parts of systemd service files, but was a huge improvement over Upstart and the old SysV-style init scripts.

Over all I think Systemd get way to much criticism. You don't have to use all the parts, but if you care to go through the documentation you'll find interesting features such as journald log-shipping and systemd-machined which can manage containers and VMs.

SEJeff  4 hours ago

Oh yes, because the well documented clean syntax of sys v init shell scripts was so nice.

If I never recall hacking in ulimit calls in the top of buggy shell scripts for crappy old services that done respect pam_limits it won’t be soon enough.

linsomniac  3 hours ago

Hard disagree. Compared to an init script, with all its boilerplate, I'd take a systemd unit file.

WesolyKubeczek  4 hours ago

Could have been worse.

Could have been YAML.

Could have been XML.

  • silvestrov  4 hours ago

    XML would have the advantage of having a grammar so we could validate the config files.

    It would also make it much simpler to make good GUI editors for the files instead of the Notepad approach most unix config files take.

    • WesolyKubeczek  4 hours ago

      Since systemd is successfully parsing its INI files, and barks at you when you put weird shit into them, a grammar for them does exist as well.

      XML is that wonderful format that gave us vulnerabilities like death by million laughs, up to a certain moment, you could MitM DTDs, and a whole slew of everything-XML stuff back when XML was like AI is today, none of which I miss today.

      Oh, and remember times when programmers would argue whether argument order in XML files should be significant or not?

      But XML books with their idealized XML future description did give me the same warm fuzzies as some intricate clockwork mechanism to a Victorian geek.