Thanks for the replies. My use case is that I don't want to auto-start
SDDM, since I usually start GNOME (Wayland) from the TTY. However there
are certain cases where I want to start GNOME on X11, for which I do
need SDDM.

On systemd you can do "systemctl disable service", so I was wondering if
there was an equivelant command in Shepherd. Removing the
service entirely and reconfiguring every time I want to start SDDM
isn't really what I'm looking for.

I'll have a look at `auto-start?`. I think it would be nice if all
services exposed this option.

On Sun, 25 Feb 2018 09:27:49 +1100
Carlo Zancanaro <carlo@zancanaro.id.au> wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 23 2018, Rutger Helling wrote:
> > Is there a way to prevent auto-starting a service in Shepherd? I 
> > find that if I use "herd disable service" it still automatically 
> > starts the service on a reboot/reconfigure.  
> 
> I've just had a look at gnu/services/shepherd.scm, and it looks 
> like system services can set `auto-start?` to #f when creating 
> their shepherd-service, but not many expose this. I think openssh 
> is the only service to expose it to the system configuration. You 
> could try patching the service you want to use to expose the 
> option to not automatically start it. Which service are you trying 
> to disable?
> 
> There's a discussion to be had about whether shepherd should 
> remember disabled services across a reboot/reconfigure. I don't 
> think it should, because the running services should be considered 
> a part of the system specification.
> 
> Carlo