Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Optional /usr merge in Gentoo

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On 19/08/2013 14:13, pk wrote:
>> sysvinit, like X11, needs a massive overhaul and a sprint clean.
> Yes, an overhaul is always welcome. But most people criticising these
> systems (and other systems) just say that they are bad without pointing
> out what is bad. How can you fix something without knowing what's bad?
> To me the problem with sysvinit (and X11) seems mostly to be a
> philosophical one. Some people say: "this doesn't work the way I want it
> to - therefore it's crap!". While others (like me) say: "I have no
> problem with this - it works fine!".


I find sysvinit to be unwieldy and clunky. Perhaps not so much the code
itself, but surely the interface it presents to me the sysadmin. All
that rc.[0-6] nonsense - what's that all about? In all my days I have
never seen a computer running *nix that wasn't fully satisfied with two
exclusive running states:

- normal operation (whether console, headless, X)
- maintenance mode (busybox on console).

So why do I have 6 of them? The runlevels themselves are fixed and
rigid. I want them somewhat more flexible, I actually don't want a
bluetooth daemon *running*all*the*time* - really, it should only start
when I enable bluetooth. This may not be the best analogy but you get
the point, the OS needs to react to changes in the environment and
sometimes those reactions are best dealt with by the service manager.

OpenRC to my mind made huge strides in dragging this into modern times
by making runlevels declarative. It all make so much sense in Gentoo. As
for the bulk of the code, I don't have issue with that. PID=1 does what
it needs to do.

I suppose I can sum up the changed environment in one word: hotplug

X11, well that's another story and probably way off topic. It was
designed for hardware and architectures that haven't existed for 20+
years. Almost all factors that made X11 awesome in the 80s and 90s
simply are not there anymore.


-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com