Re: How Unix manages processes in userland

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

> So, daemons - watched over or not?
> [...]

>       your comments and thoughts are solicited,

It would help if you didn't use paragraph-length lines.  (If you want
your text to be reflowed by the recipient, see RFC 3676.)

> NetBSD's rc.d(8) system is great - proper dependency management, and it's ea$

Maybe - but only if you're running a stock system and don't want to do
anything but the Officially Approved operations, the ones the system's
designers chose to support.

Step outside that box and it all flips upside down and you're faced
with a great deal of undocumented complexity which various other pieces
of the system assume is being used exactly as designed and which thus
ends up being a twisty little maze of shell scripts all different and
all getting in your way.

There's a reason I tend to turn off the stock daemons and run my own
from /etc/rc.local.

> The right place to deal with all of this is in process 1.  [...]

I disagree.  I'm in agreement with what kre said: there is no reason,
possibly excepting history, to do any of this in process 1.  Indeed, I
would prefer to move /etc/ttys processing out of init, into (say)
ttyspawner; I'm not sure what I'd do about runlevel processing (whether
BSD-style or SV-style or something else).  I would actually be tempted
to cut process 1 back to nothing but reaping zombies, perhaps moving it
into the kernel or even eliminating it entirely (by arranging for a
parentless process that dies to be reaped within the kernel).

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