NFD » Packaging

Looks like what we really want is to have all the dependent services (nlsr, nfd-autoreg, ...) have this in their Unit section:

BindsTo=nfd.service
After=nfd.service

And this in their Install section:

WantedBy=nfd.service

Then the dependent services need to be re-enabled (systemctl enable nlsr.service ...)

The WantedBy will cause a 'want's symlink to be created for nfd.service.
With this we don't need to add anything to the nfd.service file.

So, there will be a change to all the dependent daemons .service files.

John DeHart wrote:

And each service listed above (nlsr, nfd-autoreg, nfd-status-http-server, repo-ng, repo-ng2, ndnping and ndn-autoconfig-server) should contain this in its Unit section:

Requires=nfd.service
After=nfd.service

BindsTo= instead of Requires= is a better solution, as you already said in note-1 and I implemented in NFD commit f392b8ff44e6456aecc7374211ad60edb3380a13.

nfd-status-http-server.service is missing the Requires=nfd.service.

No, nfd-status-http-server does not require NFD to be running in order to start, and can cope with NFD restarting or crashing just fine. The dependency is unnecessary.

nfd-autoreg.service has Wants=nfd.service which should be replaced with Requires=nfd.service.

Changed to BindsTo=nfd.service instead, as explained above.

John DeHart wrote:

And this in their Install section:

WantedBy=nfd.service

Then the dependent services need to be re-enabled (systemctl enable nlsr.service ...)

The WantedBy will cause a 'want's symlink to be created for nfd.service.
With this we don't need to add anything to the nfd.service file.

This is a much better approach than using Wants=... in nfd.service (which would have been a nonstarter in my opinion). I'm still not 100% comfortable with this though, nfd does not really need any other services, and in many cases it's run alone. But I can accept adding the WantedBy= if you say that it greatly simplifies the management of multiple NDN services that run on top of NFD.

Note that you can achieve the same effect by adding a symlink in nfd.service.wants/ for each "wanted" service, as documented in systemd.unit(5). You can do this locally on your machines if you want this behavior.