Proposed guideline for init script files

[Steve Dickson]

Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Tuesday 06 March 2007 12:37:34 Steve Dickson wrote:
>> Question: what right do we have to destroy our users initscripts
>> when they changed? There has been an expectation for a number of
>> years, in a number of packages that if an initscript that has
>> changed it will be preserved on updates.. So why should we change that?
> 
> For the simple fact that init scripts should _not_ be configuration files, 
> _at_ _all_, and the packaging system should not encourage people to treat 
> them as such.  Configuration must happen in real config files so that it can 
> be preserved while things in the init script like binary name and necessary 
> options can change when the application changes.  I personally feel that the 
> init script needs to live somewhere outside of /etc to make this even more 
> clear, but that's a much larger change that I can't necessarily drive right 
> now.  If your customers have to do configuration in the init script, that is 
> a bug in your software that needs to be fixed.  
Maybe... but our customer will not be our customers for very long
if we continue to not care about their world... Why should they?

If they have to work around
> some bug that we haven't fixed yet, they really should copy the init script 
> to a new name and disable the old script, or exclude that package from being 
> updated.  We're really trying to clean up the system and consolidate 
> configuration into concise areas rather than scattered about the file system.  
> These are the changes that Fedora can make moving forward.  If RHEL doesn't 
> want to play along, that's their choice.
Please don't forget... Fedora lives for RHEL... and as soon as a
RHEL customer loses a piece of valuable information do some
uneducated Fedora policy... That policy will change...

> 
> The Packaging Committee, the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee, and your 
> own peers within Red Hat have approved this guideline, and it will be moved 
> in hopefully today.
So be it...  There is an old saying... Never let management get in
the way of doing your job... which I think truly applies here...
So my loyalties will stay with what is best for my users and their
environments, a philosophy that I'm sure my users will definitely
appreciate!


steved.