Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Paul Mahon <dufflebunk AT dufflebunk.homeip.net>]

I would disagree very strongly with making a bash based init system. The
init system must be rock solid, small, and fast. Bash is NOT rock solid,
or fast, and we would need a staticly linked bash which wouldn't be
small either. By saying it's not rock solid I mean that it is very easy
to introduce subtle errors (ex by misquoting something). If we want a
parallel boot as we can have with simpleinit, we would have hot have the
scripts doing job control. Every time I've tried making script do
anything but very basic job control I manage to cause bash to crash
every time it's run.

And there is the whole area of security... although since init scripts
run always root I'm not sure what security considerations there's be.

Use bash for what it's good at. It's not an HTTP or FTP file downloader
(although we /could/ write a bash replacement for wget), it's not good
at file processing (although we /could/ remove all sed, awk, and grep
from the sorcery scripts).  It's a command line scripting language, and
it does it's job very well. Let it do it's job, and let other programs
do theirs.


On Wed, 2004-08-12 at 08:36 +0100, Andrew "ruskie" Levstik wrote:
> Great just as I was getting happy with simpleinit-msb we go for a switch...
> I guess we shouzld make our own bash based init and be done with it
> I acctually like simpleinit a lot more than bsd init so I say why not make 
> it going
> ourselfs but yeah maybe bash based wouldn't be so bad...
> And something that's compatible with our current system for the time 
> being...
> But what kind of security flaws could we be looking at if we do...
> How about performance....
> 
>

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