[ On Tuesday, April 25, 2000 at 00:47:47 (-0400), Andrew Brown wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: rc.d (Was Re: run levels (was Re: The new rc.d stuff...))
>
> i think the /etc/ttys file should sty where it is, and the way it is.
> it's for ttys.  that makes sense.  and, whereas adding init.conf would
> be fine (for me at least), adding it under a slightly different name
> (eg inittab) would probably raise a few hackles.

You need to look a little deeper, and perhaps at a bit of history too.

Getty is just a daemon that happens to monitor a port and facilitate the
initial parameter configurations and interactions in setting up a
connection.  The fact that 'init' only manages programs running on ports
has everything to do with the way people gained access to computers
before networks supporting virtual circuits (eg. TCP/IP) came into
common use.

Have you not ever wondered why /etc/ttys has to list all the pseudo-tty
entries?  That's more of an accident than a design I think.

> ttys for ttys.  other file for other things.  lots of daemons use more
> than one config file.

Really?  I don't think there are that many actually.  In fact I can't
think of many at all right now (I am discounting some that might at
first appear to be candidates but that I don't believe qualify such as
xdm, smail, modern apache -- maybe cron qualifies, and perhaps some
versions of radiusd)

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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