Re: [gentoo-user] systemd questions: hdparm unit file, OpenRC packages

[Rich Freeman]

On Mon, Apr 10, 2017 at 3:27 AM, Raffaele Belardi
<raffaele.belardi@××.com> wrote:
> After 10+ years of LXDE/OpenRC I decided to give Gnome/systemd a try.
>
> 1. With OpenRC I used hdparm to put an external USB disk to sleep:
>
> $ cat /etc/conf.d/hdparm
> sdb_args="-S24"
>
> Looks like systemd does not provide a unit file for hdparm yet, right? If so
> I suppose I'll have to write my own.
> In general I suppose the same holds for everything that was under
> /etc/local.d/

As Kai pointed out there are units/generators to run the stuff under
local.d.  You could certainly create a unit for hdparm but a local.d
script is probably fine for something done once like this, especially
if there is no need to maintain any kind of state and undo it later.

>
> 2. Which OpenRC-related packages can I unmerge?
> - sys-apps/sysvinit
> - sys-apps/openrc

This stuff ends up being pulled in by the system set, but you can
eliminate it if you create a symlink from /lib/gentoo/functions.sh to
/etc/init.d/functions.sh.  Don't ask me why stuff STILL sources the
old location, other than it being so trivial that nobody cares that
much.  I've put openrc in package.provided just to avoid the needless
upgrades.  You can ditch sysvinit if you set USE=sysv-utils on systemd
(so that you still get stuff like reboot/halt/poweroff, though I'm not
sure how essential those actually are these days).

> - app-admin/sysklogd

Never used it, so obviously you can live without that.

> - cron/anacron after transition to systemd timers

You might want to also look at sys-process/systemd-cron as a bridge.
It basically generates timer units from your crontab and also runs the
stuff in /etc/cron.*.d/.  But, timer scripts also work just fine and I
do that for stuff that I want a bit more control over.

> - sys-apps/debianutils provides savelog functionality also provided by
> systemd but also installkernel so I shall not remove it

I use logrotate personally, and I still need it for stuff that doesn't
use syslog.

> - others?

That depends how far down the rabbit hole you want to go.  Systemd has
semi-replacements for stuff like ntpd, dns, etc.  They're not intended
as full replacements.  If you're serving time/dns/etc then you
probably won't want it.  If you just want something to manage it
locally on the host then these are fairly viable replacements.  There
is also networkd, which I use on systems that don't have wifi.

Systemd basically tries to provide all the essential services from a
client-only perspective.

-- 
Rich