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_fluxtoday at 10:47 AM2 repliesview on HN

Yes, but one only needs to write it once, and then everyone could use it. It could probably even be packaged as an official Debian package.


Replies

JdeBPtoday at 12:30 PM

It's wild to see people having this argument in the subjunctive in 2026. I've had a convert-systemd-units tool since 2014, and provided Debian packages for the toolset that it is part of for around that long.

* https://jdebp.uk/Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/convert-syste...

* https://jdebp.uk/Softwares/nosh/guide/converting-systemd-uni...

* https://jdebp.uk/Softwares/nosh/debian-binary-packages.html

simonciontoday at 11:35 AM

> Yes, but one only needs to write it once...

...and then keep up with behavioral changes that the Systemd Project people introduce and load-bearing bugs that services end up relying on for lifecycle management.

OpenRC service files are easy to write, and their schema is far far simpler than that of Unit files. [0] It's really not worth the effort to write and maintain an converter, if for no other reason than you need to understand the semantics of both systems' service files to double-check the results of the converter.

[0] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48717056>