Today I made a discovery:

Today's Fedora packaging failure: /usr/lib/systemd/system/lttng-session.service (from lttng-tools) is a PGP key, not a systemd .service unit. (Insert joke about people once again not managing to use PGP properly)

Yes, bug filed: #1935426

I discovered this because I was watching 'journalctl -f' while I upgraded my office workstation to Fedora 33 in my usual way. The upgrade process causes systemd to re-examine your unit files and complain about things. Most of the complaints were normal ones like:

mcelog.service:8: Standard output type syslog is obsolete, automatically updating to journal. Please update your unit file, and consider removing the setting altogether
xinetd.service:10: PIDFile= references a path below legacy directory /var/run/, updating /var/run/xinetd.pid → /run/xinetd.pid; please update the unit file accordingly.

But mixed in with those complaints I noticed the much more unusual:

lttng-sessiond.service:1: Assignment outside of section. Ignoring.
lttng-sessiond.service:3: Assignment outside of section. Ignoring.
[.. for a bunch more lines ..]

That made me curious what was in the file, whereupon I discovered that it was actually a PGP public key instead of a systemd unit file.

We can laugh at this mistake because it's funny in several different ways (given that it involves PGP for extra spice). But it's actually pointing out a systematic problem, one that is also illustrated by those other messages about other systemd units, which is that there's no easy way to check your unit files to see if systemd is happy with them. In other words, there is no linter for systemd unit files.

If there was a linter, none of these problems would be there, or at least any that were still present would be ones that Fedora (or any other Linux distribution) had decided were actually okay. With a linter, Linux distributions could make it a standard packaging rule (in whatever packaging system they use) that all systemd units in a package had to pass the linter; this would have automatically detected the lttng-tools problem, probably among others. Without a linter, the only way to detect systemd unit problems is to enable them and see if systemd complains. This is not something that's easy to automate, especially during package builds, and so it's fallible and limited.

(Because of that it invites people to file bugs for things that may not be bugs. Are these issues with the PIDFile location actual oversights in the packaging or an area where Fedora's standard doesn't line up with the systemd upstream? I can't tell.)

An automatically applied linter would be especially useful for the less frequently used packages and programs, where an issue has a much easier time lurking for some time. Probably not very many people have lttng-tools even installed on Fedora, and clearly not very many of them use things that require the lttng sessiond service.

PS: This isn't the only systemd project where standards have changed and some systemd bit is now complaining. Systemd-tmpfiles complains about various things wanting to clean up bits in /var/run, for example.