Subject: Re: Proposed rc.d changes....
To: der Mouse <mouse@Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA>
From: Greywolf <greywolf@starwolf.com>
List: tech-userlevel
Date: 05/05/2000 11:26:22
On Fri, 5 May 2000, der Mouse wrote:

# > I wanna bitch about rc.d, but I _can't_ (apart from its slowness and
# > ugly aesthetics).  The ability to kill a daemon without having to
# > grep its pid is actually a nicety.
# 
# Um, greywolf, if you can now kill a daemon without having to grep out
# its pid, you always could; conversely, if you couldn't, you can't now.
# It's just a question of whether the grepping and killing are done (1)
# by hand, (2) by a personal (or site-specific) script (or alias, or
# shell function, or whatever), or (3) by an rc.d script.

I think you take my point, though.  Having to do it repetitively by
hand is a pain while debugging things...

# (1) is slowest and most typing, but is hard to go very far wrong, since
# it involves a real human in the loop.
# 
# (2) and (3) are comparable on speed and typing.  The differences mostly
# have to do with upgrades: if you find the provided script does what you
# want, (3) is probably better, because it's upgraded for you in an OS
# upgrade...but if the provided script *doesn't* do quite what you want,
# (3) is worse, because your local hacks to it will get torched by an OS
# upgrade.

Yeah, there is that.  But on every install, (2) has to be re-implemented
in some form or other.  I find that the rc.d stuff is not _so_ bad.

We could be relegated to IBM's SMIT utility which would suck big dead
rats.

# Since near as I can figure, NetBSD doesn't care about supporting people
# who want to do local hacks to the boot scripts, (3) is probably best
# for them.  But I'm surprised to see *you* apparently preferring it,
# rather than (1) or (2).

The local hacks should come in the form of (1) different scripts or (2)
params in the config file.

# > Angry?  Bitter?  Why, no.  Just because there's no consensus on this
# > and it looks like we're about to get steamrolled again...
# 
# Surely it's no surprise that people who were willing to commit one
# contentious thing without consensus appear ready to commit another
# contentious thing without consensus....

It's always a surprise that a previously open group would suddenly
turn fascist.  This is almost enough to turn me away from BSD over to
Linux.  It'd sure adapt better to my work environment, and it'd give me
experience that I could take someplace else.

My technical side has a very hard time dealing with that.

# 					der Mouse
# 
# 			       mouse@rodents.montreal.qc.ca
# 		     7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B



				--*greywolf;
--
BSD: We don't care about you any more, go fsck yourself and run Linux.