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

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.
+