Re: [gentoo-dev] Init replacement

[Evan Powers <powers.161@osu.edu>]

On Friday 02 May 2003 03:23 pm, Wouter van Kleunen wrote:
> For example firewall generators generate init scripts. And sysvinit
> frontends (KDE has a frontend) uses it. I think also mandrake has a
> frontend for selecting which services get booted. I dunno about suse or
> red hat. I don't say these distro's should immediatly start using this
> init. But your claim that only 1 program parses these files is not true.

I'm not sure if those are particularly good counter examples. I'm not totally 
familiar with KDE's frontend, but I was, at a time, familiar with the 
Linuxconf equivalent.

Sysvinit frontends probably do not actually look inside the init scripts; all 
they care about is the filename. The menus for selecting which service to run 
at boot are really asking which script files you want in which runlevels. 
Most frontends serve only to manipulate the symlinks. So the script's format 
is still parsed by only one program.

As for firewall generators...what sort of generated script are you talking 
about? I'd imagine you mean that the program merely generates a sequence of 
iptables commands which initialize the tables correctly, since iptables 
doesn't have a file format of it's own. I'm not sure how wrapping the 
sequence of commands in XML markup is accomplishing anything....

That said, don't take my criticisms too harshly. I think there's much that can 
be done to improve Gentoo's init system (despite it's being quite good, 
compared to other systems, at present), and I think your direction is 
interesting. But there are a number of things in your approach which give me 
pause.

Good luck in any case,
Evan

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