At best, ordered startup should be optional, since boot otherwise takes too long on workstations. It would be nice to have hard errors when dependencies are no

At best, ordered startup should be optional, since boot otherwise takes too long on workstations. It would be nice to have hard errors when dependencies are not explicitly declared. For example, if you don’t declare dependency on the network, your service gets put in a sandbox where it can’t access the network at all. In practice, that kind of sandboxing sounds difficult. My personal experience is that it is fairly straightforward to debug races in startup. Some service fails, you look in the log and see that it has a dependency that hasn’t started, and then add that missing dependency to the service’s declaration. Just speaking from personal experience—this doesn’t come up especially often and doesn’t require a large amount of time to fix, and the benefits of fast startup save you much more time than the extra debugging costs you.