Init : someone could comment this ?

[Lennart Poettering]

On Mon, 07.01.08 11:59, Les Mikesell (lesmikesell at gmail.com) wrote:

>
> Lennart Poettering wrote:
>> Everytime I hear someone mentioning initng I get a headache.
>> They got almost everything wrong you can get wrong in an init
>> system. The kept the worst things from SysV (such as numerical
>> "runlevels"),
>
> What's wrong with numerical runlevels other than Linux flavors starting the 
> network in level 2 instead of 3?

They don't make any sense, that's wrong with them.

Why only 6 of them?

I never understood why a process like "shutdown" or "reboot" should be
considered a "level". Do you?

Nobody knows what the actually mean. They are using numeric ids for no
reason. I mean, people invented stuff like DNS for not having to
deal with random numbers that often. Why should they deal with random
numbers when dealing with init systems, then?

Almost all distributions use only 2 or 3 of them. 

Their configuration is plain awful.

They're totally awkward, because there are numeric levels and the
magic runlevel S.

Also, init doesn't really have any information what service is running
in which one is not for the current runlevel. To work around that the
configuration is highly redundant with lots of symlinks.

Then, on the philosophical level, having a single set of "runlevels"
just doesn't cut it, because services these days should only be
started maybe when a certain HW is around, or when some specific user
software runs that wants to make use of it. How do runlevels fit into
that? They are too static to reflect this dynamic way of starting and
stopping services properly.

In short, they don't make any sense. They should die.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net         ICQ# 11060553
http://0pointer.net/lennart/           GnuPG 0x1A015CC4