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"User services" section of "OpenRC" page on Gentoo wiki needs attention #1069

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@flexibeast

i recently moved from using s6-rc for user services on Gentoo to using OpenRC user services. Overall OpenRC user services are working well - thanks to everyone who made this happen.

However, even as someone with a not-insignificant amount of experience around service supervision and management (cf. e.g. this), i found the "User services" section of the "OpenRC" page on the Gentoo wiki confusing. More specifically, the several subsections of that section left me confused about exactly what i needed to do to get user services working.

In the end, all i think i needed to do for my particular setup - on which i'm currently using elogind - was:

  • Add the relevant services to the default runlevel.
  • At login, run openrc --user default.

(The latter happens via my ~/.zlogin file calling a start-services shell script that takes various approaches to service supervision and management depending on the value of an env var set in ~/.zprofile, but that's not important here.)

i don't know if that's the best or most appropriate way to do things, but that's what i came up with after not being able to make sense of the above-mentioned information on the wiki.

It feels to me like the section has been gradually added to while user services were in development, but that since that development has basically stabilised since 0.60, there's been no review of that page to ensure it straightforwardly describes Best Current Practice(s) in this regard.

The concrete effect of this is that i currently don't want to point people to the "User services" section (e.g. in contexts such as this), because i feel doing so would be likely to result in people asking questions about it that i don't know the answers to. 🙂

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