Init scritps timeout

[Dimi Paun]

On Sat, 2006-04-15 at 22:01 +0930, n0dalus wrote:
> Ideally, services depending on network, even things like web servers,
> should not fail when there is no connection and instead wait for one. 

Indeed. Now we have this static order for services initialization which
sucks. The new schemes will (hopefully) introduce dynamic dependencies.
But I feel that this is still too inflexible -- we need a well defined
API to be able to programmatically wait for a service to start/stop/etc 

For example, say we have service A (networking), and service B (httpd)
that depends on service A. Lets also assume that B needs A only towards
the end of its startup. With a 'services' API, the startup sequence for
B could be written as:
     //do time consuming part that does not depend on A
     service_wait(A)
     //do part that depends on A

Then we can start A & B in parallel and things will (A) sort themselves
automagically, and (B) achieve the fastest possible startup time,
especially on the new multicore boxes coming our way.

-- 
Dimi Paun <dimi at lattica.com>
Lattica, Inc.