> just developing their own workaround that requires users to learn another unnecessary custom way to edit a plain text file.

There's no need to use systemctl edit to make or edit an override file, its just a convenience shortcut

▲

wtallis 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> There's no need to use systemctl edit to make or edit an override file, its just a convenience shortcut

Do you think anyone who's reached this point in the thread has missed out on that? Yes, obviously those steps can be done manually. But that's not what's being recommended here, and it's more steps to learn and remember, and it doesn't really matter whether accomplishing this task requires one extra command or several when it either shouldn't need to be done at all, or should work the same for any config file that needs to be protected, not just systemd service definitions.

It's almost like one of the systemd developers looked at visudo and forgot that sudo should probably never be used as an example of the right way to do things.

▲

godelski 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Are you okay dude? I'm serious. This is obviously not about systemd, so what's up?

	▲	wtallis 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> This is obviously not about systemd, so what's up? It absolutely is about systemd. It's a project that's famous for having almost no limits to its scope, and is highly willing to break existing conventions in order to achieve a more sensible overall system architecture. Having a specialized (and relatively undiscoverable) procedure for safely editing config files is the kind of ugly hack I'd expect systemd to be strongly against. As far as I can tell, the hack in systemd's case seems to be motivated entirely by wanting to avoid problems caused by poorly-behaved package managers. It would be entirely in-character for systemd devs to just tell people to fix their package managers, and that would be the better outcome in the long run. So I'm puzzled why any systemd proponent wouldn't regard this status quo as a wart that needs to be on their roadmap to fix properly.