[Initscripts-ng-devel] Defining the workgroup objectives

[Rene Mayrhofer]

Hi all,

Some may remember me from previous discussions about the Debian init system, 
which I am long trying to improve (but haven't due to lack of time). So it's 
great that something is happening now - thanks to Henrique for starting this 
project! I completely agree with the main objectives Henrique posted earlier 
and with the design goals posted by Jay, but want to add a few points to 
them. These are mainly my primary goals for improving the init system for the 
Gibraltar firewall (which is based on Debian and currently uses file-rc for a 
number of reasons).

Am Tuesday 26 July 2005 02:44 schrieb Jay Berkenbilt:
>  * Support for interactive startup (as is available in Fedora).
I would like to add that interactive startup should not do anything too fancy, 
as it must cope with serial and network terminals with limited features. 
ncurses should be OK, but we can't depend on a full Linux console (e.g. 
Ctrl-C can, at least in my practical experience, sometimes be difficult).

>  * Debian lacks a "nice" way to control what does and doesn't start.
Agreed. What we currently do in Gibraltar for letting the admin choose what 
starts and what doesn't could probably only be described as a dirty hack. I 
certainly want to improve this. 

* All init scripts should implement a "status" command and return decent error 
codes (not only textual output). I know that this is already in discussion 
for some time, but I think that we should make that a hard requirement for a 
new init system, since the user interface for the administrator (be it 
command line, ncurses or whatever) simply needs a way of showing what is 
currently running, what is supposed to be running but isn't (e.g. PID file 
still left, but process died, ...), and what is not running. I already have 
patches for a number of init scripts that add this capability.

with best regards,
Rene
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