[BenjiWiebe]

It might actually, if a network connection is temporarily down.

[rendaw]

Or a disk not attached yet. Or another service it depends on being slow to finish starting up.

[bravetraveler]

So, you two know how systemd gets heat for doing too much, right?

This is one of those things.

The 'After=' and 'Requires=' directives address this.

Depends on a mount? Point those directives at a '.mount' unit.

Depends on networking, perhaps a specific NIC? Point those directives at 'systemd-networkd-wait-online@$REQUIRED_NIC.service'

Point being: declare these things, don't wait for entropy to eventually become stable.

[BenjiWiebe]

After and Requires are only when starting the service though. If a service (stupidly) crashes when a network connection is temporarily down (someone tripped over the router's power cord?), it needs to restart until the network connection is back up.

[bravetraveler]

Sure, but now we're kind of back where we started: 'Restart='

With the requirements properly laid out we've avoided restarting in a loop and a bit of robustness

There's also 'PartOf=' which can help make the relationship bidirectional

[kaba0]

I get your point, but these features are the bare minimum any boot system should have. If someone calls that “bloat”, they should go back and hit rocks together.

[bravetraveler]

Agreed. Relationships in 'init' are principle

Back on point though: don't expect the 11th restart to work when the last 10 didn't.

Contrived examples are contrived, it's solved. Declaring dependencies.