Subject: Re: rc, rc.shutdown proposed change
To: Martin Husemann <martin@rumolt.teuto.de>
From: Andrew Brown <atatat@atatdot.net>
List: tech-userlevel
Date: 03/12/2000 23:54:58
>> >"What he said."  I think that if an admin wants to create his own rc.d
>> >scripts, he'll want to have an easy way to identify which scripts are
>> >his own, and which came with the system (or pkgsrc, or whatever).  It
>> >should only help if NetBSD provided an easy way to do that.
>> 
>> grep -l THISISMINE /etc/rc.d/*
>
>Besides being able to tell which are mine, I don't like new invented system
>files overwriting my local extensions with the same name by pure chance (or
>bad naming conventions).

then you can call yours /etc/rc.d/*.local, but you'll still ultimately
lose.

imho, this is a game you can't win.  when updating /etc, you either
decide to allow the new changes in and lose your local changes (no
matter what granularity you try to arrange for changes) or you decide
not to upgrade and lose whatever new features the new /etc would give
you.

yes, you can have files that are marked THISISMINE, but a newer
version of /etc might have something named the same.  yes, you can
name your files with the .local extension (and perhaps even arrange
for the default files to run yours instead if they exist), but then
you need to deal with the new files coming in that overrule yours or
provide new options or simply exactly what you want.

i had dhcpd and xntpd running before there were netbsd mechanisms in
place, and i had to (in the interests of easier future upgrades)
retrofit my stuff onto the new rc* features.

it seems to me that as much as you provide options and open places to
plug things, things will grow to fill those holes.  the rc.conf.local
thing is another place where i just feel it's better to be "hands on".
i'll keep a copy of rc.conf called rc.conf.orig and modify the
original in preference to losing track of what the things are that
rc.conf actually does.  it makes upgrades easier and leaves me feeling
more secure about what's actually going on.  i'd hate to have a new
feature enabled by default simply because my rc.conf.local didn't turn
it off.  and having rc.conf turn everything off by default wouldn't
help much.

again....imho.

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