eye of cyclon animation / verbose mode no longer shown for long running tasks

[mbiebl]

I was recently investigating, why I no longer got the eye-of-cylon animation / verbose mode when long running tasks during boot happened.
Turns out this is a regression that happened because of 0d066dd.
The distros I know, setup the boot process to add quiet to the kernel command line (at least Debian/Ubuntu and Fedora) by default. This is not an explicit user choice!
They now no longer get any feedback whatsoever for long running tasks, which is a bad idea.
Imho, quiet should imply systemd.show-status=auto as before and if a user wants to have a truly silent backup, this has to be an explicit choice.

Please consider reverting this change in behavior

[mbiebl]

Let me add here that the auto mode is extremely helpful for users to see what's going on. The errors-only mode should only be left for users who explicitly configured it that way and know what that means.

[keszybz]

It's not a "regression" — it's a deliberate change in behaviour. I still think the change is appropriate: most users simply don't care about the fact that systemd-hwdb.service was executed during the boot and took 6.2 seconds to finish. Even if this did happen, why should they get a transcript of other services which were started later? Pretty much everybody nowadays wants to have a flicker-free boot straight into the graphical environment. Spewing a hundred lines of generally boring and unrelevant stuff on the screen just because something was a bit slow is not useful.

Granted, there are users who like to see the details. Those users shouldn't put quiet on their command line. "quiet" means quiet, and with this change, we actually honour the intent of that setting.

[poettering]

ok, let's drop the milestone then, as this is not clear cut