While I do not pretend to understand specifically the meaning of the various "Unit States", which seem to include the terminology "running", "waiting", "failed", "mounted", "active", "exited", "listening", "plugged", and, in particular, "dead", I suspect that the term "dead" conveys the wrong idea. I'm not quite sure what the state "dead" is supposed to convey, but that term has, for me - and I expect, for many people - the specific connotation of "broken", as in "no longer able to function properly", which I suspect is not what is meant. I have the impression - not sure about the documentation - that the Unit State term "dead" does not represent a permanent state, nor a "broken" state. Perhaps the more appropriate term for this state would be "dormant", or something similar. Certainly, for the new user especially, there is reason to avoid using the term "dead" in any utility showing the Unit State. Aren't the various Units in a "dormant" state, until they are activated or reactivated in some way? James
You understand that this is not a technical issue, but rather a political issue. Displaying an emotionally alarming term like "dead" is not the best way to win-over a system administrator, using systemd for the first time. "Oh no! Systemd is not working!" - definitely not what you want. I still have not found a list and description of all possible Unit States in the man pages - maybe something to add to the "To Do" list for the man pages? James
I fear it's a bit too late to change the name of this (fundamental) state now that we are already shipping systemd in multiple distros, even if it is not ideal. So I don't think it would be wise to change it now.
(In reply to comment #2) > I fear it's a bit too late to change the name of this (fundamental) state now > that we are already shipping systemd in multiple distros, even if it is not > ideal. So I don't think it would be wise to change it now. "fear"? - What do you fear? > it's a bit too late to change the name of this (fundamental) state now > that we are already shipping systemd I was not able to follow the line of reasoning there. You, perhaps, are presuming some additional consequence-mechanism of "shipping" of which I am not aware? > in multiple distros Ha! That will be nice - eventually. > I don't think it would be wise to change it now. The irony being that, it has not been "too late" to change "init", and that program has been shipping for many many years! One man's wisdom... I thought we were just talking about for i in `find src/`;do perl -p -i -e 's/"dead"/"dormant"/g' $i;done or for i in `find src/`;do sed -i -e 's/"dead"/"dormant"/g' $i;done Why - was there something else that needed to change? There are only around ten of those substitutions. >> I still have not found a list and description of all possible Unit States in >> the man pages - maybe something to add to the "To Do" list for the man pages? > WONTFIX ???! You won't fix the documentation??? James
(In reply to comment #3) > > in multiple distros > > Ha! That will be nice - eventually. Fedora, Mandriva, Pardus, Frugalware have shipped with systemd as default. SUSE, and some others have shipped it, but not as default, but will in the next release. > >> I still have not found a list and description of all possible Unit States in > >> the man pages - maybe something to add to the "To Do" list for the man pages? > > > WONTFIX > > ???! You won't fix the documentation??? There's terse documentation about the high-level states of units in systemd(1), under "CONCEPTS". The low-level states are not documented on purpose, since we want to have the liberty to make minor changes to them later on (also see http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/InterfaceStabilityPromise). Renaming "dead" to "dormant" would be a bigger change however, hence I'd rather not do that change anyway, unless we have a very very good reason for it, and I am not seeing that. Sorry.
It occurs to me that systemd is a rather "chatty" program, and that International Language Support is going to be important at some point, with respect to both the "words and phrases" and the alphabets. I suspect that you are only postponing the inevitable, and better to build a foundation for this language support as you go, or at least to consider the ramifications, and not impose some "english only" policy. James
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