Hi Konrad,

Konrad Hinsen <konrad.hinsen@fastmail.net> skribis:

> When running Guix in a docker image, I get systematic failures for
> starting several services: syslogd, nscd, openssh. It turns out that in
> all these cases the daemons are started, but so slowly that shepherd
> declares a failure before they are fully operational.
>
> I managed to fix this for syslogd by setting #:pid-file-timeout to 30
> s. But I don't see a similar parameter for nscd and openssh, and
> moreover it seems more reasonable to increase the timeout for all
> services. Is this possible? I didn't find anything in the Shepherd
> manual.

‘read-pid-file’ in the Shepherd has a hard-coded default value of 5
seconds.  You can change it for each service, but there’s currently no
way to change the default value globally.

The patch below adds a SRFI-39 parameter in the Shepherd that would
allow you to change the default PID file delay globally.

Then, on the Guix side, we could provide a configuration option
“somewhere” (where?) to set that.  Or, you could simply add a Shepherd
service that modifies that value before any other service is started.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Ludo’.