[gentoo-user] Re: heads-up: 2011-05-01 baselayout news

[walt <w41ter@gmail.com>]

On 05/02/2011 02:43 AM, Mick wrote:

> I've been through the migration guide.  In the section about udev it mentions
> /etc/runlevels/sysinit.  Is this something added by baselayout2/OpenRC?  I
> don't seem to have this in my runlevels:
>
> $ ls -l /etc/runlevels/
> total 16
> drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 18 20:39 boot
> drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jun  8  2010 default
> drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 21  2010 nonetwork
> drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 21  2010 single

The confusion with all of this booting stuff goes back to the very dawn
of unix, long before linux appeared.  I learned at the knee of someone who
actually remembers the dawn -- but of course I'm much too young myself :p

The conflict between "environment" and "profile", the origins of ".profile"
and ".bashrc" go back IIRC to the competition between sh, csh, and bash for
dominance -- not to mention ksh, tsh, foosh, and barsh, bahsh etc, etc.

Each shell had its own private configuration file(s), which needed distinct
names, of course, to avoid chaos.  Chaos prevailed, predictably, because of
these conflicting standards, and you/we are still dealing with the problem
today.  (No, I am NOT complaining, I'd be bragging except I had nothing to do
with any of it.  But I did have the honor of meeting many very smart people
who do have real bragging rights.)

Anyway, to answer your specific question,

#equery b sysinit
  * Searching for sysinit ...
sys-apps/openrc-0.8.2-r1 (/usr/share/openrc/runlevels/sysinit)

#equery b inittab
  * Searching for inittab ...
sys-apps/sysvinit-2.88-r1 (/etc/inittab)

Why did I search for inittab?  Here's a wee hint while I'm off to bed:

#grep sysinit /etc/inittab
si::sysinit:/sbin/rc sysinit