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