[pm90]

I've had the opportunity to delve into systemd in a previous role.

This sounds a bit weird, but its not easy to get started with, unless you're used to reading man pages. But once you're able to read man pages, all of systemd behavior is documented in the man pages. I do wish there were more human friendly docs though, especially for younger engineers used to better sorts of docs.

Anyways, once you do get the hang of it, its an immensely powerful system, but like any such system it has its quirks and edge cases. You can get 99% of what you need with it though, and for low level tasks on machines, its pretty amazing.

[dinosaurdynasty]

systemd has amazing documentation, you just have to read them...

[egberts1]

I think a link prominently placed on their website would be helpful.

Also systemd documentation isn't compliance with:

* Tutorial

* Explaination

* How To

* Reference

For instance, I want to know which part of systemd uses `SYSTEMD_DEBUG`.

Hold on ... I am digging thru the Git repo.

Screw the systemd manual:

Here's my environment variable reference guide for debugging systemd (that is NOT documented by systemd)

https://egbert.net/blog/articles/debugging-a-service-in-syst...

[mariusor]

> I think a link prominently placed on their website would be helpful.

It's such a weird disconnect seeing people that can't go outside of the mindset that everything is a web application.

Systemd ships their documentation (most of what you asked for, actually) with the package, and their environment variables description can be found in /usr/share/doc/systemd/ENVIRONMENT.md (at least on my machine).

When you're dealing with the applications which form the building blocks of a *nix environment your first step should not be google, but grepping through the /usr/share/doc, and using the apropos and man commands.

[pm90]

> It's such a weird disconnect seeing people that can't go outside of the mindset that everything is a web application.

I don’t think thats what’s happening here. Providing online documentation thats easy to read, easy to navigate has become quite standard of all kinda of projects and systems. My main programming environment is a mac so Im certainly not gonna have the locally installed docs anyway.

Not only does a good online documentation make it easier to understand for an individual, but it makes it easy to share links etc to others to help them understand too. And the easier it is to comprehend, the better.

[mariusor]

iOS is not a target for systemd, and the building blocks of a *nix system probably are not the building blocks of iOS.

> Not only does a good online documentation make it easier to understand for an individual, but it makes it easy to share links etc to others to help them understand too

God forbid developers package their software considering the needs of users that don't have 24/7 internet access. If it wasn't clear from my previous statement, this is what I wanted to express by the "mindset that everything is a web-application".

[egberts1]

Right. But still, I had to do some digging and this time it only came from its source code for description, references, and still no How To.

[mariusor]

> still no How To.

How to what? systemd umbrella contains a lot of functionality, just like the detractors keep on telling us.

If you found a way to improve the systemd documentation you should probably reach out to the devs: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/tree/main/docs

[egberts1]

Still no debugging HOWTO, much less (but still poorly documented) DEBUG-related environment variables?

If you want people to troubleshoot your stuff (which is arguably the #1 documentation to start with), gotta start someplace (which is for most of us is agrep'ing the code, or save yourself a step and look at my link).

Or the RedHat/IBM systemd development team can quit doing that terse but cryptic error code output.

Or the documentation team can start covering these error codes.

But having to do any form of "agrep" is a sign of poor ... everything, unless formenting job security is what the ultimate goal is.

[egberts1]

Documentation and Systemd will remain a weird disconnect.

until it address the 4-ways Divio documentation methods.

https://documentation.divio.com/