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Date:      Fri, 29 Jan 1999 00:15:16 -0700
From:      Brandon Gillespie <brandon@roguetrader.com>
To:        freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   more modular rc/init/uninit system...
Message-ID:  <19990129001516.A21986@cold.org>

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This sortof thing has been discussed before, and in the past I have
felt rather indifferent to the whole issue, but as I an paid to work
more and more with SYSV style systems (pretty much everything not
free, anymore) I have come to dislike some of the inadequacies of the
BSD rc/init system.  Specifically:

   1) Have you ever wanted to re-run just a small subset of what is
      contained within /etc/rc or its sub ilk?  And instead you ended
      up skimming the code and manually cutting and pasting to get
      the desired effect?
   2) Have you noticed the growing number of modularized aspects for
      rc?  (checkout /etc/rc.*)
   3) How many times have you wanted to shutdown and/or restart a
      system process, started by these scripts and configured by
      rc.conf?  Your only recourse is manually doing so...
   4) What do you think of the dual standard with /etc/rc* vs
      /usr/local/etc/rc.d?

This has made me reconsider the system, and at one point I thought
about making a port/package that would frob the default rc system=20
to be more of a hybrid SYSV/BSD system.  However, the daunting factor
of keeping it up to date has made me discard this idea.  Instead,
I'll just toss it out for discussion.

To preface, I realize (and personally believe) that the SYSV method
is overly complex.  And largely irrelevant to BSD systems (without run
levels).  With this in mind I've tried to workup a modular _simple_
system that could easilly work with what we have, and would give much
benefit and gain (imho, of course :)  Also note, it doesn't discard
current mechanisms, it just enhances them.  So while people would need
to learn the expanded functionality, it is not a complete paradigm
shift.

Because I am not sure if this is even of interest, I'll just point to
a page explaining my alternative hybrid idea:

    http://www.roguetrader.com/~brandon/rc-alt.html

Frankly, it would not take much work to implement.  The most work
involved would be in updating the ports/packages that currently write
their own init scripts to conform to a unified standard shared by both
system rc files and /usr/local rc files.  Changing /etc/rc* to the
suggested system would probably take a day, with a week or so of testing.

-Brandon Gillespie

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