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Comment by _2z1p | Hacker News Reader

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_2z1p

They said simple and obvious, which much of systemd is not.

Personally I find the OpenBSD solution far more elegant and UNIXy than the systemd one, but to each their own.

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Why does the complexity of the rest of systemd matter when comparing the implementation of this feature?

What would you say is wrong with RandomizedDelaySec?

UI is too complicated to type some word concatenated keyword than being visually intuitive.

On the other hand I wouldn't be able to understand what the hell is this cron string. I actually have no idea about cron format despite the fact that I used it multiple times. I have to read man every time I use it. Also different software implements it differently.

  [Timer]
  OnCalendar=daily
  RandomizedDelaySec=12h

might take few more seconds to type, but it's definitely readable without any additional documentation.

The option says Sec but the value says h? What does that mean?

Sec is a standard suffix for time values, anything ending with Sec accepts a value in seconds. 12h is shorthand for 'the number of seconds in 12 hours'

Standard where? I have never seen this before and I’ve been reading *nix configuration files for 20+ years

Standard within systemd (i.e. consistent).

It's standard to say 12h and expect this to read as 43200?

Sounds like a lousy standard if the correct way to use it is to say "I want to delay by 12 hour seconds". What is even "12 hour seconds"?

In our code at work we have constants like HOUR=3600 and RESTART_TIME_SECS = 6 * HOUR. It makes sense to me. If it doesn't for you, feel free to use something else I guess.

Makes sense once you know it.

"Sec" suffix indicates time and implements a default of seconds, where a suffix to the value indicates a change in unit.

It would be like Asking "Memory Allocation(MB)" but accepting "12G" for 12 GB.

> The arguments to the directives are time spans configured in seconds. Example: "OnBootSec=50" means 50s after boot-up. The argument may also include time units. Example: "OnBootSec=5h 30min" means 5 hours and 30 minutes after boot-up.

https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.tim...

Ie seconds if no units specified.

What's more simple than an ini file?

Reinventing the same features many times over in many different places, of course.

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