Re: [gentoo-dev] rfc: locations of binaries and separate /usr

["Olivier Crête" <tester@gentoo.org>]

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On Fri, 2012-01-06 at 08:44 +0800, Patrick Lauer wrote:
> On 01/06/12 05:26, Olivier Crête wrote:
> [snip]
> > The only thing I see them sacrificing is loose coupling, they provide
> > more functionality than any other init system, more correctness
> > (seriously, did you ever read most init scripts out there?), more well
> > defined behavior (all systemd systems boot exactly the same), more
> > stability (I'll claim that Lennart's C is better than any of the
> > boot-time shell scripts I've seen) and well understandability depends
> > who much you can understand C. Probably a bit less understandable for
> > sysadmins, but since they can just play with config files, it's
> > probably easier to understand in the end (and much less prone to
> > breaking than mucking around shell scripts). 
> As you apparently have no idea what a sysadmin does I'd appreciate it if
> people like you didn't try to guess what would make things better and
> instead listened to people that have more than their desktop to run.
> (Hint: It's not pressing reset buttons)

I know what they do.. play in random scripts until whatever they're
trying to hack together it seems to work, because oh well, its just a
one time thing..  and then when stuff breaks they call Red Hat's support
line.

> Given the choice between a single line of shell ( cat "$urandom_seed" >
> /dev/urandom ) or 145 lines of undocumented C (which, if naively
> modified by me, might just make systemd segfault) ... there is no choice.

Actually, you don't have to do that, systemd does it for you and takes
care of all the annoying details [1].

That said, you can trivially disable systemd-random-seed-save.service
and systemd-random-seed-load.service and instead write a unit file that
runs whatever you want. You don't HAVE to do any C to run stuff from
systemd, but it does provide many things written in C that are much more
solid than the shell equivalents.

> I do agree with you on one point - most init scripts are really bad
> code, but that doesn't mean shell is bad, it means that you need to
> educate people and file bugs. I've laughed at SLES' /etc/bashrc, I read
> most of upstart and wondered how ... why ... is it can be drunk tiem?
> Still that doesn't mean that rewriting it in bad C is in any way more
> agreeable, and you just made debugging exquisitely painful. Yey.

The big reason for C vs shell scripts is that the type of people who
write them are not the same.. The type of people who write shell scripts
tend to hack together stuff until it works. The people who write C tend
to think about the problem for a long time and then write a complete
solution that tries to take into account all of the possible error
scenarios.

[1] http://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/tree/src/random-seed.c

-- 
Olivier Crête
tester@gentoo.org
Gentoo Developer

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