On Mon, 1 Jan 2001, Al B. Snell wrote:

> On Sun, 31 Dec 2000, Frederick Bruckman wrote:
>
> > Problem: the variables need to be set before you run "rcorder", before
> > you've done almost anything -- "/" is still mounted read only. The
> > best separation we can accomplish here is to have /etc/rc.pkg.conf.
>
> Why? rcorder just looks at the comments in the scripts - it doesn't
> actually execute them, and /usr/pkg/etc/rc.conf is source from in the
> scripts...

/etc/rc sources /etc/subr and /etc/rc.conf (which sources
/etc/defaults/rc.conf), and then runs rcorder. This is one of the
first things done at boot time, while the root filesystem is still
mounted read-only. All the ordering and deciding what gets run before
what is done by the rcorder magic, which by the way is not hard magic
-- if something needs to run after /usr is mounted (or after anything
else), it's just a simple matter of changing the "REQUIRES:" tag.

Now you (rhetorical you) ask for "rc" to fsck and mount file-systems
_before_ running rcorder. This is going to be difficult to do without
destroying the elegance of the scheme, and the result of the effort is
going to be a hard sell, especially when a simpler alternative is
available (that is, dumping everything into /etc/rc.d).

The way I remember the discussion, was that /etc/rc.d was intended to
be a repository for third party scripts all along, and the very reason
for breaking up the old monolithic /etc/rc into little scripts was so
that the new, assorted scripts could be slotted into the boot sequence
sanely.

--


Frederick