Poettering: systemd for Administrators, Part IX

The ninth installment in the “systemd for administrators” series is actually a lengthy discussion on why Lennart thinks that distributions should get rid of the /etc/sysconfig or /etc/default directories. “They are inherently distribution-specific. With systemd we hope to encourage standardization between distributions. Part of this is that we want that unit files are supplied with upstream, and not just added by the packager — how it has usually been done in the SysV world. Since the location of the directory and the available variables in the files is very different on each distribution, supporting /etc/sysconfig files in upstream unit files is not feasible. Configuration stored in these files works against de-balkanization of the Linux platform.“