Poettering: systemd for Administrators, Part VIII

Lennart Poettering is back with another edition of “systemd for Administrators”. In it, he outlines some changes to configuration filenames and locations as part of an effort to standardize them across distributions. “Many of these small components are configured via configuration files in /etc. Some of these are fairly standardized among distributions and hence supporting them in the C implementations was easy and obvious. Examples include: /etc/fstab, /etc/crypttab or /etc/sysctl.conf. However, for others no standardized file or directory existed which forced us to add #ifdef orgies to our sources to deal with the different places the distributions we want to support store these things. All these configuration files have in common that they are dead-simple and there is simply no good reason for distributions to [distinguish] themselves with them: they all do the very same thing, just a bit differently.“