On Fri, Apr 20, 2001 at 02:56:48PM -0400, Kevin Sullivan wrote:
> On Fri, 20 Apr 2001 11:34:39 +1000, Luke Mewburn says
> >It's not used in the base rc.d scripts because of my stylistic
> >preferences (some people disagree); I felt that if we started using
> >BEFORE in the base rc.d scripts it would end up being abused and
> >potentially make it harder to debug.
> 
> I find that BEFORE is very useful when you need to squeeze a local rc.d
> file into a very specific place in the boot sequence; otherwise you have to
> modify standard rc.d files to REQUIRE the new one, and it gets ugly
> quickly.

If you read the part of my message before the bit you quoted,
you'll see that I stated this position as well; BEFORE was intended
for third-party (aka `local') scripts so that you can insert them into
the sequence without editing the base rc.d scripts.


> /etc/rc should look in /etc/rc.d.local/ or somesuch for local rc.d files.
> Updating /etc during upgrades is already much easier than it used to be,
> but seperating out local rc.d files would be better still.

There was a lot of debate about this type of thing in tech-userlevel a
year or so ago. There was no definite solution, which is why it hasn't
been solved yet. I suggest that people go back and read the archives
before rehashing the same arguments for and against this.

For example, one of the problems with /etc/rc.local.d (or
/etc/rc.d.local - there's an entire flamewar about the name!) is that
you're then separating your rc.d scripts out. Maybe you can cope with
that. Maybe it's just an extra imposition on your admin staff by
saying ``well, use /etc/rc.d/foo start, unless it's something that
we've installed, and then it's /etc/rc.local.d/foo, or if it's a pkg
it's /etc/rc.pkg.d/foo.''. It might get annoying. (and that's my
personal opinion).

That said, NetBSD is an open source operating system. Part of the
advantage of it is that you're free to modify /etc/rc to call
rcorder with the extra directories you want to run; it's rather
trivial, and /etc/rc shouldn't require updating from /usr/src/etc
very often, since it's not likely to change much in the future.