Public SourceMage Discussion List

[seth AT swoolley.homeip.net]

On Wed, Feb 28, 2007 at 04:27:36PM -0600, Jeremy Blosser wrote:
> On Feb 28, seth AT swoolley.homeip.net [seth AT swoolley.homeip.net] wrote:
> > I thought I might forward this onto the discussion.  The major issue 
> > with simpleinit-msb on newer kernels has now been isolated (not that 
> > there aren't still minor issues).  :)
> > 
> > A lot of people helped contribute to fixing this bug.  I'd like to thank 
> > them all, including David Kowis, Jeremy Blosser, Andrew Stitt, Juuso 
> > Alasuutari, David Brown, George Sherwood, and Arwed v. Merkatz.
> > 
> > Excellent example of teamwork.
> 
> That's one spin.  ;-P  While I definitely appreciate everyone helping on
> this, this is to me an excellent example of why we need other options, even
> just one other option for the short term.  That's too many people and too
> many hours spent on finding something that ended up being this trivial,
> isn't it?
> 
> "How many SMGL devs does it take to screw in a lightbulb?"

This bug was extra hard for a few reasons that aren't necessarily 
expected in the future:

* There was an unrelated kernel change in signaling that distracted the 
system call traces.

* There was a kernel change that changed file semantics significantly.

* The code problem was in a small block of code not allowing userspace 
init to find the problem, since it only acts directly on the console in 
non-userspace mode.

Other than that, I doubt most init systems even have a userspace init 
mode and have zero bugs and never had issues with portability due to 
kernel changes.

That we handled it is reason enough to believe that we're capable of 
maintaining deep code like this on our own.  Yes, we might not want to, 
and that's reason enough to make alternatives available, but we mustn't 
overreact and remove simpleinit-msb as a result of this bug.

There are a few other improvements that nobody is mentioning in these 
discussions that I'd like to make to it that could be considered 
detriments, but I don't think the level of argument against 
simpleinit-msb has reached that level of sophistication (yet).

Maybe the initng maintainer will bring the sophistication up and give 
reason enough to say that simpleinit-msb is fundamentally flawed.

I, for one, don't think it is fundamentally flawed.

Seth