Paralell startup

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Wed, 20 Oct 2004 10:34:27 -0400, bill peck <bill.peck at gmail.com> wrote:
> Could some of the ordering be determined by the dependancies that are
> already present in the rpm database?

I really don't think you want to rely on rpm's concept of a
'dependancy'. startup script logic can have not completely trivial
conditional logic. And rpm's dependancy definition is very very not
suited for conditional situations. rpm natively understand hard
dependancies and thats about it. This is even a problem for post/pre
scripts in rpm packages to deal with. I don't think its a good idea to
rely on rpmdb for "some" of the information at this point. I'd much
rather require manual dependancy creation when writing the startup
scripts instead of relying on an automation step that will still
require human review after the fact because it can't be trusted to get
conditional dependancies correct.  I'd much rather have development
manhours focused on building simple tools to help verify hand created
dependancy information so its easier to review changes to the parallel
flow, than see time spent on tools that automate dependancy creation.
Your going to burn a lot of time just trying to come up with a tool
that can parse shell script conditionals looking for things like
executables or files present on the system. And personally i think the
effort to do this sort of thing in an generally useful and
encompassing way is FAR more effort than it would take to just hand
edit each and every initscript to add dependancy information.

-jef"Invokes the "need a more structured initscript file like xml"
argument just to move this discussion along towards its ultimate
climatic battle"spaleta