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From: "Daniel Sobral"<Daniel_Sobral@voga.com.br>
To: hackers@freebsd.org
cc: dcs@gns.com.br
Message-ID: <032564F3.00442A2C.00@papagaio.voga.com.br>
Date: Thu, 14 Aug 1997 09:54:08 -0300
Subject: Weird idea: rcfs
Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
X-Loop: FreeBSD.org
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I was reading some stuff about S and K files, AIX rc, etc, etc, etc, when I
had this weird idea.

Now, while I *hate* SysV way, and I strongly oppose those who want that
crap brought to our
beloved OS, starting and terminating services, and defining sets of service
(personally, I think
non-deterministic automata "state" definition is appropriate, but I
digress) _is_ useful.

So, I was just thinking... Why not an rc filesystem? The idea is still not
fully formed, but I'm thinking
of two distinct parts. One to store configuration, and the other more akin
to procfs. The configuration
storing could probably be dismissed, but it may be interesting to hide the
awful amount of symbolic
links some other OS have... :-)

For example (and notice that, in this example I use "state" as in "status
quo"):

/etc/rc.d	                         Base directory
/etc/rc.d/config	                        Configuration part
/etc/rc.d/config/services	                    Services configuration
directory
/etc/rc.d/config/services/network	       Basic network configuration
directory
/etc/rc.d/config/services/sendmail	           Sendmail configuration
directory
/etc/rc.d/config/services/sendmail/depend	    Dependencies directory
/etc/rc.d/config/services/sendmail/depend/network	Well, not really, just an
example...
/etc/rc.d/config/services/sendmail/coreq	     Co-requisites configuration
directory
/etc/rc.d/config/states	                 States configuration directory
/etc/rc.d/config/states/homedocked	           Homedocked state
configuration directory
/etc/rc.d/config/states/homedocked/depend	    Etc...

The procfs-like would be used to indicate services running, their state,
etc. Probably undoable, though.
Well, we *could* have it with full state information for compliant (i.e.,
modified to use rcfs) servers, and
stay with the amount of information we (don't) have right now for the rest.

The idea right now seems full of flaws, but it _seems_ to have potential.
But then, I'm love special fs...