systemd (Was Re: tmpfs for strategic directories)

[Matthew Miller]

On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 06:39:43PM +0200, drago01 wrote:
> Again the sysadmin case just implies that something *else* is broken.

Sure. As a distribution, we don't have control over upstream projects and
their assumptions for daemon startup, shutdown, status, etc. Sometimes, they
want odd things.

> Well if changing over to C does only get rid of this "disease" it
> would be enough of a gain.
> It would force broken apps to be fixed, and let admins edit
> *configuration* files and not source code.

If you think you can get every open source / free software project to agree
on completely consistent behavior, or if you can create a text-format config
file for your compiled daemon handler which handles every unanticipated
case, well, okay. But it seems unlikely. (And that's not even considering
running non-free software, which, while something I try to avoid, is a
reasonable real-world use.)

> Why don't people try to configure lets say X by editing its code'?

X is one program produced by one project, with a text-mode config file that
handles all of its possible options. That's easy.

> Does this sound wrong to you? If yes than why would initscripts be
> different?

Because the initscripts system needs to flexibly handle and "make pretty"
any random mess thrown at it.

-- 
Matthew Miller <mattdm at mattdm.org>
Senior Systems Architect -- Instructional & Research Computing Services
Harvard School of Engineering & Applied Sciences