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  • From: Andrew <afrayedknot AT thefrayedknot.armory.com>
  • To: sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Discuss] Why simpleinit-msb ?
  • Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 14:45:06 -0700

On Tue, Jun 14, 2005 at 04:57:20PM +0200, Dragan Stanojevic - Nevidljivi
wrote:
> Hello folks,
>
> I'm new to this distro, but I'd like to help.

Thank you for your feedback.

>
> I don't know the reason why have you abandoned sysVinit. First of all
> simpleinit-msb is not longer maintained. It's successor LFSinit has not
> been changed since 01/2005. And not to say the reasons in
> WHY_SYSVINIT_SETUPS_SUCK file in simpleinit-smb tarball are childish to
> say the least.

As far afaik those are their views, not ours, however, having lived
through the times when we tried to make the sysvinit scripting style
work with what we wanted, I have to politely disagree with you and say
that sysvinit is pretty lousy for what we wanted.

> simpleinit demonstrates why sysvinit was created!

I think you have this backwards, although i could be wrong, our simpleinit
setup was created after the sysvinit style was thought up.

>
> I think the sysvinit is a way to go. simpleinit is hard to understand at
> first, makes smgl boot process as complex as it gets, and all SA are
> already quite familiar with sysv init. You're making smgl a lot less
> desirable because of it :(

I really think thats percieved complexity from it being new, and not
actual complexity. Life at smgl got a whole lot nicer when our init
script setup was simplified and predictible, unlike it was with sysvinit.

Pretty much any SA is familar with rh and rpm, does that mean we should
abandon sorcery and start using rpm? No. Just because others are using
(what we think is) inferior technology, doesn't mean that we should
settle for it. We think what we have is better, and I believe that any
SA who knows whats good for them recognizes that the sysvinit script
style is a far cry from ideal for many tasks. I'll also point out that
another more popular source based distro uses python for their init
system, I can't imagine why they made that decision.

>
> Is there some explanation why have you abandoned it?
>

Let us draw a line between the init program (/sbin/init) and the
init scripts (/etc/init.d). In many respects the two are independent.
Lets not get confused between the sysvinit script style (symlink forest
with [SK]\d+name), and the actual sysvinit program which knows nothing
of this.

Is your complaint about the fact that we have a different binary
program as /sbin/init or that we have our own scripting setup layered
on top of the program?

I do not think sysvinit scripting style lends itself well to automation
with user intervention, inter-script dependencies, both on bootup and on
shutdown, or handling parallel init script execution like our setup does.

Keep in mind that our setup requires very little modification to existing
sysvinit style init scripts. In many cases, ours are actually smaller
due to common code being factored into libraries.

That being said, it certainly would be possible to switch back to using
the sysvinit /sbin/init program with our current scripts layered on
top. The facilities simpleinit-msb provides would simply need to be
written in bash. In fact, an even simpler init than simpleinit-msb or
sysvinit could be used if that were to be done. Really, all the init
program has to do is execute a known script, and then wait() on orphaned
processes, so in that regard, just about anything would do.

-Andrew

--
__________________________________________________________________________
|Andrew D. Stitt | astitt at sourcemage.org |
|irc: afrayedknot | afrayedknot at t.armory.com |
|aim: thefrayedknot or iteratorplusplus | acedit at armory.com |
|Sorcery Team Lead | ftp://t.armory.com/ |
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