On Sat, Apr 01, 2000 at 09:58:06PM -0800, Greywolf wrote:
> On Fri, 31 Mar 2000, Simon Raahauge DeSantis wrote:
> 
[snip]
> # Airport (such a neat gadget)). NetBSD is dependable. NetBSD is beautiful.
> # There are no gross hacks. There are no idiotic 'features'...
> 
> ...modulo the proposed split of /etc/rc.conf...

I haven't kept up on -CURRENT, so I don't know this. But I would be very
unhappy with any sort of rc.d change. Having a centralized rc config is the
way to go. It scales well enough with rc.local (and I could very quickly
setup rc.local.conf or get things from rc.conf to use in rc.local if I
wanted to). This seems to me to be in the (Net)BSD spirit: simple,
effective, flexible. I haven't used Linux very much or any other OS with
rc.d but from my understanding it's a framework to do exactly what we do now
with a few shell scripts. Runlevels seem idiotic. We have single-user and
regular/multi-user. If I need for whatever reason some services running in
single-user (like networking to get at backups) I can very easily start it
by hand. This is easier than trying to understand grotty run levels. Anyone
who would be doing such a thing would have the expertise to do so by hand
and it would be so rare that it's just fine to do so. If for some bizzare
reason your requirements are different it's not so hard to roll your own
script (which you would probably do anyway to deal with your particular
setup, like if you needed some sort of half-multiuser mode we're already
talking some custom work). I liken this to the package system. I've done a
few things with the Debian package manager. It's easy, yes. But I like the
NetBSD system better. It gives me more freedom in how I do things. It's less
intrusive. It's just like everything else. It's not special. No special
syntax (I'm mostly referring to runlevels here).

[more snippage]
> 
> All in all, so far, even with rc.d, NetBSD is still worth running far
> and away over any other platform out there, and I will echo the above
> sentiments as someone who's been with NetBSD/sparc since its inception.
> 
> Now if we can ansify the Sun consoles and support the 24-bit frame buffers
> :-)...
> 

If you want to see a nasty Sun monitor check out
http://ghostpriest.rakis.net/~xiamin/pics/sun-stack.jpeg
It's the monitor from my Quadra (the box is under the desk), two IPXen, a hd
case, a tv, and the Sun monitor ($10 at the MIT flea). I can take a more
impressive picture with a few more Sun boxes if someone wants to put it in
the Action gallery (the Quadra is displaying X in MacOS from the black IPX)

-- 
-Simon Raahauge DeSantis