DISTRO_PORTING

Porting systemd To New Distributions

HOWTO:
        You need to make the follow changes to adapt systemd to your
        distribution:

        0) Make your distribution recognized via the autoconf checks
        in configure.ac. Grep for the word "fedora" (case
        insensitively) and you should be able to find the places where
        you need to add/change things.

        1) Patch src/hostname-setup.c so that systemd knows where to
        read your host name from. You might also want to update
        status_welcome() in util.c.

        2) Check the unit files in units/ if they match your
        distribution. Most likely you will have to make additions to
        units/*.m4 and create a copy of units/fedora/ with changes for
        your distribution.

        3) Adjust Makefile.am to register the unit files you added in
        step 2. Also you might need to update the m4 invocation in
        Makefile.am. Grep for the word "fedora" (case insensitively)
        and you should be able to find the places where you need to
        add/change things.

        4) Try it out. Play around with 'systemd --test --system' for
        a test run of systemd without booting. This will read the unit
        files and print the initial transaction it would execute
        during boot-up. This will also inform you about ordering loops
        and suchlike.

CONTRIBUTING UPSTREAM:
        We are interested in merging your changes upstream, if they
        are for a big, and well-known distribution. Unfortunately we
        don't have the time and resources to maintain
        distribution-specific patches for all distributions on the
        planet, hence please do not send us patches that add systemd
        support for non-mainstream or niche distributions.

        Thank you for understanding.

BE CONSIDERATE:
        We'd like to keep differences between the distributions
        minimal. This both simplifies our maintenance work, as well
        as it helps administrators to move from one distribution to
        another.

        Hence we'd like to ask you to keep your changes minimal, and
        not rename any units without a very good reason (if you need a
        particular name for compatibility reasons, consider using
        alias names via symlinks). Before you make changes that change
        semantics from upstream, please talk to us!

        In SysV almost every distribution uses a different
        nomenclature and different locations for the boot-up
        scripts. We'd like to avoid chaos like that with systemd right
        from the beginning. So please, be considerate!