Proposed guideline for init script files

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Tue, 2007-03-06 at 13:05 -0500, 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.  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.
> 
> 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.
Yes, they all failed - It's a serious mistake.

Ralf