Proposed guideline for init script files
Ralf Corsepius
rc040203 at freenet.de
Wed Mar 7 03:31:04 UTC 2007
On Tue, 2007-03-06 at 13:05 -0500, Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Tuesday 06 March 2007 12:37:34 Steve Dickson wrote:
> > Question: what right do we have to destroy our users initscripts
> > when they changed? There has been an expectation for a number of
> > years, in a number of packages that if an initscript that has
> > changed it will be preserved on updates.. So why should we change that?
>
> For the simple fact that init scripts should _not_ be configuration files,
> _at_ _all_, and the packaging system should not encourage people to treat
> them as such. Configuration must happen in real config files so that it can
> be preserved while things in the init script like binary name and necessary
> options can change when the application changes. I personally feel that the
> init script needs to live somewhere outside of /etc to make this even more
> clear, but that's a much larger change that I can't necessarily drive right
> now. If your customers have to do configuration in the init script, that is
> a bug in your software that needs to be fixed. If they have to work around
> some bug that we haven't fixed yet, they really should copy the init script
> to a new name and disable the old script, or exclude that package from being
> updated. We're really trying to clean up the system and consolidate
> configuration into concise areas rather than scattered about the file system.
> These are the changes that Fedora can make moving forward. If RHEL doesn't
> want to play along, that's their choice.
>
> The Packaging Committee, the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee, and your
> own peers within Red Hat have approved this guideline, and it will be moved
> in hopefully today.
Yes, they all failed - It's a serious mistake.
Ralf
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