Bug 77031

Summary:	RFE: Adopt a rudimentary 'initctl' wrapper as the merge commit to end-of-life Upstart
Product:	systemd	Reporter:	Derek Moore <derek.p.moore>
Component:	general	Assignee:	systemd-bugs
Status:	RESOLVED WONTFIX	QA Contact:	systemd-bugs
Severity:	normal
Priority:	medium
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	All
OS:	All
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:
Attachments:	Fedora's "service" wrapper

Description Derek Moore 2014-04-03 20:43:08 UTC

'systemctl' is an annoyingly over-long to type.

'service' was tab-completable at 'servi' on most systems.

'systemctl' is not tab-completable until 'systemc' on most systems.

'initctl' is tab-completable at 'initc' on most systems, in line with the convenience of 'service'.

'systemctl' and 'initctl' have several commonalities in their command-line argument structure, unlike 'service'.

A minimal wrapper would appease the hordes that will be coming over from Upstart and could benefit those of us who cringe every time we have to type 'systemctl' or who constantly mix up the argument ordering between 'systemctl' or 'service' regardless of which one we're trying to call.

An 'initctl' wrapper should be smarter, more usable, and more feature-rich than the 'service' wrapper which appears to be an afterthought with debug-mode standard output, but it need not implement the entire initctl man page. Heck, it'd be happy if it were just a symlink to systemctl that came with the systemd distribution files.

Comment 1 David Strauss 2014-04-06 06:00:07 UTC

I recommend Ubuntu handle this the same way as the "service" wrapper deployed to Fedora systems, which is included in the initscripts package [1] outside of systemd. Additionally, it would be confusing for systemd to ship the "service" wrapper to Ubuntu or an "initctl" wrapper to Fedora.

I'm attaching a copy from a Fedora 19 machine in case it's helpful. Marking WONTFIX under the assumption that it will be continue to be solved at the distro level.

[1] https://apps.fedoraproject.org/packages/initscripts/

Comment 2 David Strauss 2014-04-06 06:00:40 UTC

Created attachment 96969 [details]
Fedora's "service" wrapper

Comment 3 Lennart Poettering 2014-04-11 00:08:33 UTC

I agree with David, compatibility with Distro-specific init system control commands really needs to be implemented by those distributions. We don't really want to carry compatibility stuff upstream if we can avoid it.

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