openRC user services

[Matthias Geiger]

Hi,
On Tue, 01 Apr 2025 10:12, Mark Hindley <mark at hindley.org.uk> wrote:
>Matthias
>
>On Mon, Mar 31, 2025 at 10:56:22PM +0200, Matthias Geiger wrote:
>> as you might know, openRC 0.68 gained support for user services.
>
>Just for correctness, it was 0.60; 0.61 is packaged in experimental.
>
>> This is a huge improvement IMO, and I would like to get wider adoption of
>> openRC. Because this is fairly new, not much services have been written. An
>> example can be seen here: [0]
>> I'd plan to collect of list of user services and then test them under Debian
>> with openRC. I'm unsure where to get them included. Most upstreams likely
>> won't accept MRs for this :( .
>
>I agree this would be an uphill struggle.  My personal opinion is that
>maintaining scripts in a separate package would also be a complete PITA.
>
>The solution I envisage is to generate openrc scripts from the unit files with
>src:utrans. I added initial user script support to my local git yesterday!
>
>The generated scripts are not always identical or quite as clean as a
>handcrafted one[1], but in general they are functional. The only one I know
>doesn't work is /usr/lib/systemd/user/dbus.service as it uses a systemd-specific
>address.
>
>But smcv is always very reasonable and I think it strengthens the argument to
>ship an openrc user file in src:bus if the generated one is broken (just as
>src:dbus still includes an LSB initscript).
>
>Mark

thanks for the helpful explanation. After the release I will try to push 
for at least the pipewire script to be included, and some others, too 
(geoclue, colord).
Mark, do you have a list perhaps of user services that would be 
resonable to have a script for ? Also, do they need any hooks in 
.postinst to enable the service, or will this be taken care of 
automatically ?

best,

werdahias