Init : someone could comment this ?

[Nils Philippsen]

On Mon, 2008-01-07 at 10:44 +0100, Enrico Scholz wrote:
> Casey Dahlin <cjdahlin at ncsu.edu> writes:
> 
> >>> A shell which emulates POSIX process handling in-process and uses
> >>> direct builtin function calls for commands like sed [...] Pipes and
> >>> the like would also have to be emulated
> >>
> >> For what do you need 'sed' or pipes to start/stop a daemon?
> >>
> > It appears at least 13 times in our current init system.
> 
> I think, nobody doubts that current initsystem is the worst one of
> the major linux distributions.

Can the hyperbole please -- we know what we have otherwise we wouldn't
be having this discussion.

>   By changing paradigm from forking to
> non-forking daemon you can avoid all the complicated 'stop' code;
> e.g. 'start' will be
> 
> | pid = fork();
> | if (pid==0) { /* ... */ execve(...); }
> 
> and 'stop' be
> 
> | kill(pid, SIGTERM); /* wait for timeout/sigchld */ kill(pid, SIGKILL);

That'd be all fine and dandy for daemons that simply need to be started
without any variable options or preparations and are obliging enough to
write pid files. I don't think that e.g. the postgresql or xendomains
start scripts would fit well into that scheme.

> But python or other bloaty scripting languages are not a solution and
> completely unacceptable at this place.

"Bloaty" is something that could be solved, don't you think? If python
was split up in a base package that contained the directory structure,
the binaries, the (small) documentation and only basic modules (with no
additional requirements) and a package containing the rest of the
modules, much of the (dep-)bloat wouldn't be an issue if init scripts
(ehh modules) would be limited to that basic set. With the set of
modules I would choose, such a python-base package would have less
dependencies than bash and only account for roughly 2.6MB on the disk as
well -- bash takes up about 5.1MB.

Nils
-- 
     Nils Philippsen    /    Red Hat    /    nphilipp at redhat.com
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary
 Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."  --  B. Franklin, 1759
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