Initscripts and LSB compliance

[Michal Marciniszyn]

Hi,

due to my recent investigations, nearly none of the initscripts that we 
have included in RHEL/Fedora are LSB (Linux Standard Base) compliant. 
I'm not talking about problems with %config stuff, but about the 
functionality of the scripts. Main problems are constructions like

[ -f /etc/service_conffile ] || exit 0

which ends the script with exit code 0 when there is no conf file for 
the service. Another big issue is wrong functionality of status call of 
initscript... And of course, the wrong return codes. The LSB compliance 
is IMHO one of our targets, so we should take care of this one. The LSB 
definitons can be found on:

http://refspecs.freestandards.org/LSB_3.1.0/LSB-Core-generic/LSB-Core-generic/tocsysinit.html 


Our first step should be to produce guidelines (we have some for RHEL, 
but they are not obeyed), then force the developers to obey that. It is 
no big deal, but having all scripts behaving correctly and in some sense 
the standard way is definitely good think.

--michal marciniszyn
mmarcini at redhat.com