[Pkg-systemd-maintainers] Bug#732981: Bug#732981: ExecStart et al should be capable of honouring PATH

[Michael Stapelberg]

Hi Ian,

Ian Jackson <ijackson at chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:
>> Lennart replied that using $PATH makes it easy to end up running a
>> binary that is not the one the service file author had in mind.
>> [etc.]
>
> I'm not really convinced by this.
And I can see why. In your reply you state that the intention is for the
admin to be able to override which binary gets executed. It seems like
upstream and you just have two different opinions about the same feature:

AFAICT, you want to have this to get control over which binary is
executed.

Upstream argues that with this feature, it is too easy to lose control
over which binary is executed.

> The purpose is that the administrator can override existing programs
> by putting them earlier on the PATH, perhaps in /usr/local or perhaps
> elsewhere.
The canonical way of doing that with systemd (e.g. for apache2.service)
is dropping in a little configuration file into
e.g. /etc/systemd/system/apache2.service.d/override.conf, containing

  [Service]
  ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/apache2

> Would you accept a patch to fix this problem in Debian's systemd (of
> course, I think it would be better if such a thing went upstream
> whether right away or eventually).
No. Just like in our previous conversation in #732157 (the SIGSTOP
feature request), I am personally not at all interested in carrying any
significant features in Debian’s systemd package. Those should all go
upstream. My rule of thumb for this is: will people have to think “Ugh,
should this run on Debian? Then I need to do $x differently.” when
writing service files?

-- 
Best regards,
Michael