From owner-freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.ORG Mon Nov 19 03:05:33 2007 Return-Path: Delivered-To: FreeBSD-ports@FreeBSD.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 822F416A417 for ; Mon, 19 Nov 2007 03:05:33 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from chuckr@chuckr.org) Received: from mail1.sea5.speakeasy.net (mail1.sea5.speakeasy.net [69.17.117.3]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 60DEF13C468 for ; Mon, 19 Nov 2007 03:05:33 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from chuckr@chuckr.org) Received: (qmail 19014 invoked from network); 19 Nov 2007 01:18:44 -0000 Received: from april.chuckr.org (chuckr@[66.92.151.30]) (envelope-sender ) by mail1.sea5.speakeasy.net (qmail-ldap-1.03) with AES256-SHA encrypted SMTP for ; 19 Nov 2007 01:18:44 -0000 Message-ID: <4740E430.9050901@chuckr.org> Date: Sun, 18 Nov 2007 20:17:36 -0500 From: Chuck Robey User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.8.1.9) Gecko/20071107 SeaMonkey/1.1.6 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: FreeBSD-ports@FreeBSD.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Subject: ports modifying system setups X-BeenThere: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Porting software to FreeBSD List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Mon, 19 Nov 2007 03:05:33 -0000 I was wondering why ports apparently aren't allowed an obvious freedom, that of being able to set themselves to run as daemons. A greate long time past, I seem to remember that there used to be a file /usr/local/etc/rc.local, which (if it existed) would be automatically sourced in at the end of rc.conf. Ports which built daemons were allowed (well, actually, expected) to ask the user if they wished to activate the port, and if so, the port would add a line of the form 'portname_enable="YES"', and this would make your new port operate. Well, it seems from what I see of my new system, that this is no longer the case. I could understand (and approve of) ports not being allowed to modify any /etc/contents, but howcome ports can't use this rather obvious workaround? I'm pretty sure this used to be allowed... and it seems like a good policy to me, from the number of non-technical folks who now run FreeBSD. I just wanted to know why its not anymore.