Re: [gentoo-dev] eselect init

["Walter Dnes" <waltdnes@waltdnes.org>]

On Sat, May 25, 2013 at 01:57:39PM +0200, Tom Wijsman wrote
> On Sat, 25 May 2013 12:25:03 +0200
> Peter Stuge <peter@stuge.se> wrote:
> 
> > I would actually expect the change to take effect immediately.
> 
> Then how would you be able to shutdown / reboot your system in a clean
> way? The premise here is that when you boot with an init system you
> must shutdown with that same init system, you can't just start one init
> system and expect the other init system to cleanly shut down its
> services. Therefore implementing this would either be unclean or way to
> complex. 
> 
> From all the methods discussed doing it on boot sounds the most sane.

  It has to be done *VERY* early at boot, or else we're back to the
problem you described above.  It's almost like a brain surgeon operating
on himself.  Here are a couple of "outside the box" ideas that haven't
been mentioned yet...

1) boot into single mode before doing the changeover.  Both grub and
lilo support single mode boot as per...
http://www.gentoo-wiki.info/TIP_Booting_into_single_user_mode

2) have the setup/switchover mechanism built into the Gentoo minimal
install ISO.  The advantage here is that if the system ends up no longer
bootable off the harddrive, you can still boot from the ISO, chroot into
the system on the harddrive, and send emails to the gentoo-user list
asking for help <G>.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org>
I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications