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Comment by na85 | Hacker News Reader

>The TODO item is about avoiding restoration of screen brightness at boot to such a low level that some laptops consider it to be a "backlight off" state. Someone may have shut a laptop down (even automatically) with the backlight off, but we think it should probably turn back on on the next boot. Absolutely nothing to do with "crashing" bootup.

Honest question: Why does an init system need to know anything about screen brightness in the first place?

Shouldn't X11 handle screen brightness?

>I'm not sure what this is even claiming. Is this some sort of trolling about complexity the author thinks systemd will eventually add and is some sort of advance critique?

This is, I think, about the fact that systemctl edit is even a thing that exists. What's the problem with ed, vim, nano, pico, emacs, etc. that necessitates some kind of built-in systemd editor?

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> Honest question: Why does an init system need to know anything about screen brightness in the first place? Shouldn't X11 handle screen brightness?

I think that's a reasonable question. I am only a regular desktop user of systemd for anything with a display, so I don't have a strong opinion there. All of my advanced systemd work is on server systems; I have more opinions there.

> This is, I think, about the fact that systemctl edit is even a thing that exists. What's the problem with ed, vim, nano, pico, emacs, etc. that necessitates some kind of built-in systemd editor?

There isn't a built-in systemd editor; that's how disingenuous this piece is. Running "systemctl edit <unit-name>" invokes $EDITOR, whatever that is configured to be. Totally normal Unix behavior here.

>There isn't a built-in systemd editor; that's how disingenuous this piece is. Running "systemctl edit <unit-name>" invokes $EDITOR, whatever that is configured to be. Totally normal Unix behavior here.

Well, okay, but the suckless people are about simplicity. Adding systemctl edit seems like a completely unnecessary alias. Another feature for the sake of having another feature.

Why assume the user is too stupid or lazy to manually invoke vim and then systemctl daemon-reload?

This is no different from crontab -e, visudo and other programs that invoke $EDITOR..

> Why assume the user is too stupid or lazy to manually invoke vim and then systemctl daemon-reload?

This is what it does:

(1) Locates the current unit file, regardless of whether it shipped with a package or is already a custom one in /etc. (2) If there isn't one in /etc, it copies the current one into the correct place. (3) It opens $EDITOR on that file. (4) It runs systemd daemon-reload.

It's really the first two steps that can be annoying because you'd otherwise have to run "systemctl status" to find where it is currently and then copy it over. I guess you could script that, but is it really so terrible to support that in systemctl -- which is just a normal user CLI utility, not anything with advanced privileges or critical impacts on system stability?

Edit: Punctuation

Init has no idea of the screen brightness.. that 's just another thing the author pull out from his back-passage. a separate service systemd-backlight@.service(8) saves and restores the backlight state, because firmware does not remember it or if it does, it is buggy.

I think you will find that the brightness stuff is aimed at Wayland, not X11. The latter is something that many wants to see depreciated ASAP.

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