Date: Tue, 1 Dec 1998 05:11:13 -0500 From: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> To: Adrian Filipi-Martin <adrian@ubergeeks.com>, "John S. Dyson" <dyson@iquest.net> Cc: Eivind Eklund <eivind@yes.no>, rssh@grad.kiev.ua, grog@lemis.com, wes@softweyr.com, tlambert@primenet.com, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: System V init (was: Linux to be deployed in Mexican schools; Where was FreeBSD?) Message-ID: <v04011702b2896a58913b@[128.113.24.47]> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.981201013554.4238J-100000@lorax.ubergeeks.com> References: <199811301510.KAA02669@y.dyson.net>
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At 1:56 AM -0500 12/1/98, ADRIAN Filipi-Martin wrote: > >On Mon, 30 Nov 1998, John S. Dyson wrote: >> The problem with the current structure is the single file (or small >> group of single files) that are not easily seperable. The default >> BSD configuration is pretty much a monolithic morass. I don't like >> a terrible morass of multiple files either. However, the current >> argument is similar to structured programming vs. excessive goto >> programming (or programming in traditional, non structured basic.) >> As released, the monolithic scheme is okay, but systems don't stay >> the way that they are when released from an OS vendor. > > Ok, I told myself to roll over and play dead on this topic, but > I guess I cannot help myself. Heh heh. I've been trying to tell myself to add my own two cents on this discussion, but I've had mixed feelings about most of the proposals so I haven't said much until the DEPEND/RETURNS idea came along... > I guess we just see things differently. I view the rc?.d > directories and their name based ordering as a worse morass than the > monolithic BSD rc's. I rarely find them useful, and I rather like > being able to page through the rc and quickly know what's going on. > This is no longer possible once it is broken into 30 or 40 files. I do find the smaller RC scripts useful, particularly when I need to change something, particularly if I want to make sure that change does not get lost when new system releases are installed. Note that if we went with something like a simple C program run at startup to process the DEPENDS/RETURNS comment lines, that program could just write out what it's going to do into some logfile. One might then be able to check this logfile to find out every thing which has been started or stopped since the most recent reboot. The program could easily have a parameter saying "read all the current startup files, and tell me what you'd do without actually doing anything". > I don't actually believe the BSD rc's are all that > monolithic anyway, oligolithic at best. With rc, rc.serial, > rc.pccard, rc.network, rc.firewall, rc.atm, rc.<arch>, rc.local > and rc.shutdown things are reasonably broken up, IMHO. For the most part they are reasonably broken up, but if you're adding packages or other customizations you sometimes need to modify something in the middle of one of those files just for ordering purposes. I always feel uneasy doing that. It's one thing if I have to change (say) rc.network because I want to change *networking*, it's something else if I'm changing that just because I want to insert some other thing after "part A" but before "part B" in the file I'm changing. This gets even more unnerving once it's done for some product a company is putting together. I have installed products (on other OS's) which had friendly installers which edit /etc/rc* scripts as part of the install, and that seems like a really bad idea to me. Now, if that's all they can do then that's all they can do, but I would much rather that they would not have to do that. --- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@eclipse.its.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or drosih@rpi.edu Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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