Comment by davidstrauss | Hacker News Reader

Comment by davidstrauss | Hacker News Reader

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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

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