Init : someone could comment this ?

[Casey Dahlin]

Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
>>>>>> "CD" == Casey Dahlin <cjdahlin at ncsu.edu> writes:
>>>>>>             
>
> CD> On that note, is there a packaging requirement now that any new
> CD> init scripts must have LSB headers?
>
> Not at this time.
>
> CD> Should there be?
>
> Well, a while back a pile of bugs were filed against everything with
> an initscript, people set out to fix their packages and found very
> poor documentation and weird corner cases but not a whole lot of
> answers to their questions.
>
> If that can be avoided, then fine.  But just making up rules with
> nothing to back it up doesn't really work well.  Not to mention that
> since initscripts are interdependent, there's actually an ordering
> that must be followed when fixing them.  For example, if I require an
> SMTP daemon to be running before I can start, what exactly does my
> initscript use for Required-Start:?  I can't know that until at least
> sendmail and preferably all of sendmail, exim and postfix are fixed
> first.
>
>  - J<
>   
All very true. For packages providing anonymous services we should 
probably have a generic provide (such as "$syslog" for the system log, 
and other such services). This could be standardized before any package 
changes, allowing the packages to be updated in any order (at the moment 
the validity of these dependencies doesn't matter much, as the scripts 
currently shipping with Fedora attest, so if the dependencies are broken 
because the target service hasn't put the correct provides in place, we 
can survive). I'm sure there are more questions. There is a wiki page 
covering the specifics of how Fedora intends to implement these headers:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FCNewInit/Initscripts?highlight=%28fcnewinit%29

perhaps we should put effort toward maintaining it and making it 
unambiguous.

I had some questions about the practicality of Required-Stop: myself. 
Should we really refuse to kill a service based on a dependency? Killing 
it anyway can't be worse than the angry kill -9 which inevitably follows.