init: API

[Gilboa Davara]

On Thu, 2005-11-17 at 08:35 -0500, Dimi Paun wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-11-17 at 11:52 +0200, Gilboa Davara wrote:
> > I wrote a large number of WinNT/2K services and from my experience,
> > it's the last system we'd want to duplicate.
> 
> Thanks for your input. Those are implementation issues that we'd
> want to avoid. What about the API though? Is the API a good starting
> point? What did you like/dislike about it?
> 
> -- 
> Dimi Paun <dimi at lattica.com>
> Lattica, Inc.
> 

The API itself... is well, a OS2/Windows API. 
(Translation: Very ordered with meaningful names and a lot of
extra-useless options.)
I believe that we should first decide on what-we-need, before looking at
the API itself.

Don't forget that unlike Microsoft Windows, most the services we would
be running are normal daemonized binaries. 
IMHO, out service manager should:

A. Handle normal daemonized binaries. (Duh!)
B. Start/stop/reload services (Double duh).
C. Handle multiple /dynamic/ dependencies . (One of the services I wrote
actually replaced the MS dependency system due to the rather limited
build-in SCM dependencies support)
D. Handle auto restart, messaging on failure, etc.

How the API will look in the end, is less important at this point.
Gilboa