[Mageia-dev] latest kernels not powering off machines on shutdown

Thierry Vignaud thierry.vignaud at gmail.com
Thu Aug 9 21:55:20 CEST 2012


On 9 August 2012 21:51, Colin Guthrie <mageia at colin.guthr.ie> wrote:
>>>> But even since I know it has changed, 10 years habits had me typing
>>>> halt and then saying some bad words as it meant I would not be able to
>>>> power it on again for a few days.
>>>
>>> OK, how about a compromise, "urpmi restore-broken-halt-command" which
>>> just contains a single file /etc/profile.d/99broken-halt-command.sh
>>> which contains:
>>>
>>> alias halt=poweroff
>>>
>>
>> Well my own machine already has halt='halt -p' since the day I lost it
>> like that :)
>> What annoys me is that I don't see the point of changing the default
>> behavior of a (quite important) command while the new default is
>> something people would only want to use in very rare cases and will
>> cause problems to most of them.
>
> Well, for me personally, I always prefer to fix things that are broken
> and not use history as an excuse for keeping broken behaviour.

I could counter argue that's a lame excuse for breaking existing documented
behavior. Scores of people rely on that behavior.

What's more it's an established behavior in some communauties (eg: the kernel
one) to not break usage for the purpose to fix things if it breaks
existing apps or
usage.

> It
> doesn't take long to adapt to new commands and the people of the future
> will never need to learn the history behind why such a quirk exists.

And what about DMs that call "halt" ?

> Anyway, I very much do not want to patch systemd to change upstream
> behaviour here. If we have to work around it then someone who cares
> enough can create the package as I suggested above, or take the cause to
> upstream systemd and get them to change the behaviour.


More information about the Mageia-dev mailing list