The service is deployed with standard systemd package, which doesn't
have that set as far as I see it (no SYSTEMD_AUTO_ENABLE_${PN} in the
latest recipe revision)

I think, after browsing through the code of systemd - this "autostart"
behavior comes from [1].
So I would say you can disable it with a drop-in file at
/etc/systemd/system/systemd-timesyncd.service.d/disable.conf
[Install]
WantedBy=

which also would be charming in a way that it isn't that invasive in the
build system

[1]
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/5b639090d0b4a49d77ba58bebe180b2a6f8da322/units/systemd-timesyncd.service.in#L55

haven't tested it though, but you might wanna give that a shot, if
Aaron's approach doesn't work.

On 23.11.20 21:21, Joel A Cohen wrote:
> I think you need to set SYSTEMD_AUTO_ENABLE = “disable” (actually any
> value other than “enable”) in your bbappend.
>
> (It looks like SYSTEMD_AUTO_ENABLE_${PN} is intended to work too, but I
> can’t verify it at the moment and reading over systemd.bbclass I’m not
> sure if it works or not)
>
> —Aaron
>
> On Mon, Nov 23, 2020 at 11:51 AM Damien LEFEVRE <lefevre.da@...
> <mailto:lefevre.da@...>> wrote:
>
>     Hi,
>
>     I would like to have systemd-timesyncd.service as part of an image
>     but have it disabled by default.
>
>     Right now it is enabled by default which causes some issues.
>
>     I've tried systemd_%.bbappend
>
>     do_install_append() {
>          rm "$D/etc/systemd/system/dbus-org.freedesktop.timesync1.service"
>          rm
>     "$D/etc/systemd/system/sysinit.target.wants/systemd-timesyncd.service"
>     }
>
>     but those symlinks are not part of the package.
>
>     I've tried this to remove the link during the package deployment
>     during do_rootfs
>     pkg_postinst_${PN}_append() {
>          #!/bin/sh -e
>          rm "$D/etc/systemd/system/dbus-org.freedesktop.timesync1.service"
>          rm
>     "$D/etc/systemd/system/sysinit.target.wants/systemd-timesyncd.service"
>     }
>
>     But at this stage the links still don't exist.
>
>     Which package is actually responsible for enabling the default
>     services / creating the symlinks? How can we turn some of them off
>     while keeping them in the image?
>
>     Thanks,
>     -Damien
>
>
>
>
>
>
>