Redesigning System Services (Re: My 2 cents on the whole Fedora to succeed as global wide deployed desktop are...)

[Martin Sourada]

On Tue, 2007-09-04 at 23:05 +0200, Stewart Adam wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-09-04 at 10:45 -0400, Jeremy Katz wrote:
> > 
> > Actually, the bigger problem is the concept that everything has to be a
> > "system service run from an initscript".  To pick a specific case -- the
> > fact that bluetooth daemons get started by an initscript as a service is
> > really not what you want at this point.  You instead want them being
> > started based on the existence of the hardware probably as a hal
> > callout[1].
> +1
> 
> The ideal solution would be to run bluetooth only when bluetooth
> hardware is present, the same when applicable to all other services.
> 
> About the defaults - If/When should we reselect what will be the
> defaults? I forget which release it was planned for, but I do remember
> seeing a page on the Wiki at one point about disabling sendmail and the
> rpc* services, but it never seemed to have happened. I think it would be
> a good change to make for F8. A small one, but a change nonetheless.
> 
> Stewart
> 

We are past the feature freeze, I don't think this is possible... BUT.
This thread is finally getting some shape as well as my ideas on this
issue. The firstboot services screen was bad idea and I take it back, we
should focus our efforts better. That means, as you and some others also
suggested:

1. redefine the default set of services. Should be runlevel dependent
and it should include only the services that are crucial to
non-problematic run on every machine and that provide good user
experience as well (like automounting CD's)

2. add support for automatically turning on services dependant on
hardware. If you plug in bluetooth, HAL detects it and turn on the
bluetooth services. Should be however handled in a way where user can
have control over the service if (s)he want. That would mean that we
would need three states for such a service: turned off by default,
turned on by default, automatic.

3. Improve the system-config-services. Its great tool and has great
potential but its confusing at first look. We need to provide to each
service such a description *AND* name that everyone (well, I exaggerate
here a little...) will understand it. 

4. Some services that require a change of firewall rules to run
correctly should offer such a change (but not do the change
automatically, sometimes you want to have specific rules for the
firewall, like opening ports only to specific IPs). These are mostly
server services like sendmail, postfix, vsftpd, ...

5. Would be good if we provide gui utilities for easy (and only basic)
configuration of services that has configuration capabilities. Should be
accessible from system-config-services. 

I hope this list makes sense, I think I learned a lot in this particular
thread... We could maybe, if the changes are desirable and sane, add
this on the F9 feature list.

Thanks,
Martin
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