init: API

[Kenneth Porter]

--On Sunday, November 20, 2005 6:52 PM +0200 Gilboa Davara 
<gilboada at netvision.net.il> wrote:

> A. Who said that both / and /usr are on the same partition? (Or on the
> same machine for that matter?)

Yep, this is a separate issue. Mounting /usr read-only is desirable, so 
putting it on a separate partition is nice.

Ignoring XML specifically as the configuration language, what's important 
is that the language have a common parser, so that every service doesn't 
have to provide its own. If not XML, do we invent a new language, or codify 
an existing one? If an existing one, someone needs to extract the parser 
from some single implementation and declare it the one that all others will 
be rewritten to use, so that there's no ambiguity in the syntax.

So far all init scripts are written in Bash, and the ones I'm familiar with 
use simple variable=value pairs, using Bash syntax. Is that sufficient? 
What can't be expressed in that way?

The hierarchical configuration I've seen has been in the networking 
scripts, and is encoded in the filesystem, using filenames or directory 
trees to represent configuration nodes. What's the drawback of that, if any?