Bug#771122: restarting the journal breaks other services

[Michael Biebl]

Package: systemd
Version: 215-6
Severity: serious

We restart systemd-journald in postinst on upgrades [0].
Unfortunately, this breaks other services like network-manager [1].

There was a recent discussion on #systemd, where Lennart mentioned in a related
context (full IRC log is attached), that restarting journald is a bad idea,
as it is not properly supported atm:


<poettering> JayF: but note that restarting journald to actually make it count is not really that good an idea
<poettering> JayF: since we cannot push the stdout/stderr fds everywhere we will just close them
<poettering> that means as you restart journald you lose the stdout/stderr output of all daemons, and you cannot get it back


Unfortunately I failed to write a better commit message when I added the
restart to postinst [2].
I *think* I added it because I noticed problems on upgrades, when
systemd was re-execd and the new systemd was talking to the old
journald, i.e. a v204 systemd talking to a v44 journald led to garbage
in the journal log.


I'm not sure if we can just drop the restart completely.

There is also [3], where the location of the syslog socket has changed.
Maybe the least invasive change is, to move the systemd-journald
restart into the
if dpkg --compare-versions "$2" lt-nl "215-3"; then
fi
section, so it's only run once, and not on every upgrade.


Marking this as serious, since we need to find a solution for this for
jessie.



[0] http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/pkg-systemd/systemd.git/tree/debian/systemd.postinst#n135
[1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=756144
[2] http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/pkg-systemd/systemd.git/commit/?id=faacffefa2ffe7fd40fd1717a582f438e5ad1e45
[3] http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/pkg-systemd/systemd.git/commit/?id=e7ab0fc6f7497581ee1c48be44705bab175f7e02

-- Package-specific info:

-- System Information:
Debian Release: jessie/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (200, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 3.16.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=de_DE.utf8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages systemd depends on:
ii  acl             2.2.52-2
ii  adduser         3.113+nmu3
ii  initscripts     2.88dsf-58
ii  libacl1         2.2.52-2
ii  libaudit1       1:2.4-1
ii  libblkid1       2.25.2-3
ii  libc6           2.19-13
ii  libcap2         1:2.24-6
ii  libcap2-bin     1:2.24-6
ii  libcryptsetup4  2:1.6.6-3
ii  libgcrypt20     1.6.2-4
ii  libkmod2        18-3
ii  liblzma5        5.1.1alpha+20120614-2+b1
ii  libpam0g        1.1.8-3.1
ii  libselinux1     2.3-2
ii  libsystemd0     215-6
ii  mount           2.25.2-3
ii  sysv-rc         2.88dsf-58
ii  udev            215-6
ii  util-linux      2.25.2-3

Versions of packages systemd recommends:
ii  dbus            1.8.12-1
ii  libpam-systemd  215-6

Versions of packages systemd suggests:
ii  systemd-ui  3-2

-- Configuration Files:
/etc/systemd/journald.conf changed [not included]

-- no debconf information

-- debsums errors found:
debsums: changed file /lib/systemd/system-generators/systemd-sysv-generator (from systemd package)