[rescue] Re:EMACS

[Joshua D. Boyd]

Are there any good documents describing and comparing the init sequences
of different linux distributions, and other unixes?  I found that with
time, I figured out Slackware and Redhat, but I still never new what the
"right" way to add new items was.  I'm nearly totally lost in Debians boot
sequence.

--
Joshua Boyd

On Thu, 28 Jun 2001, Greg A. Woods wrote:

> [ On Thursday, June 28, 2001 at 01:06:39 (-0500), Dan Debertin wrote: ]
> > Subject: Re: [rescue] Re:EMACS
> >
> > Most of the folks who say that wouldn't recognize a BSD init if it smacked
> > them in the face ;). It is in fact nothing at all like it, it just isn't
> > SysV-ish, and sucks more than SysVinit to boot.
> 
> Indeed....
> 
> > The current NetBSD rc.conf/rc.d layout effectively combines the good
> > things about both init styles, with none of the things sysadmins hate
> > about SysV. IMO.
> 
> Well, as a sysadmin I only ever hated the original *BSD startup stuff.
> 
> W.r.t. system configuration and startup/shutdown processes SysV,
> especially by the time of SysVr4.0, was a joy, a dream, a pure delight
> to manage (compared to most anything unixy that came before it).
> 
> Of course that's not to say that there weren't implementation problems
> with the SysV startup stuff.
> 
> The new NetBSD stuff really does clear up most of the problems and
> present a very clean implementation that's also very easy to use and
> extend.  Its author claims the same setup has been used quite
> successfully on most commercial unices (i.e. with both *BSD and SysV
> init programs driving it).
> 
> Oddly *BSD people still seem to prefer to have init's states hard-coded
> and hidden inside /sbin/init.  I'd prefer to have them open and exposed
> to run-time data-driven control (i.e. /etc/inittab), but either way's
> more or less fine so long as what they drive is manageable.  (Last time
> I mentioned the internal states of *BSD init on one of the NetBSD
> mailing lists to my surprise I got quite a number of vitriolic replies
> trying to claim that *BSD init is not a state machine!  Having just
> added another state to my own version and munged about with shutdown and
> reboot, and thus having a full understanding of their internals, I had
> great fun taunting them with the reality of their world!  ;-)
> 
> (One major advantage of having significant things hard-coded inside
> /sbin/init is that it's possible to tie the boot processes to the
> console device and thus allow a much higher degree of interactive
> control over the boot-up and shutdown processes.)
> 
> -- 
> 							Greg A. Woods
> 
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