From owner-freebsd-current Tue Feb 26 21:39:51 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from femail5.sdc1.sfba.home.com (femail5.sdc1.sfba.home.com [24.0.95.85]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 34E9537B400 for ; Tue, 26 Feb 2002 21:39:48 -0800 (PST) Received: from bean.overtone.org ([68.80.217.72]) by femail5.sdc1.sfba.home.com (InterMail vM.4.01.03.20 201-229-121-120-20010223) with ESMTP id <20020227053947.RCRM16233.femail5.sdc1.sfba.home.com@bean.overtone.org>; Tue, 26 Feb 2002 21:39:47 -0800 Received: by bean.overtone.org (Postfix, from userid 1001) id 7A80B5C102; Wed, 27 Feb 2002 05:39:42 +0000 (GMT) Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2002 05:39:42 +0000 From: Kevin Way To: Sean Chittenden Cc: current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: NetBSD-style rc.d Project Message-ID: <20020227053942.B91597@bean.overtone.org> References: <20020226051811.K52727@blossom.cjclark.org> <20020226191104.A55023@ninja1.internal> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: <20020226191104.A55023@ninja1.internal>; from sean@chittenden.org on Tue, Feb 26, 2002 at 07:11:04PM -0800 Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG * Sean Chittenden [27-02-02 04:05]: > I'm about to dive into doing some work for an rc system for the ports > (${PREFIX}/etc/defaults && ${PREFIX}/etc/rc.conf) and have an interest > in learning about the way they've done things. Does their paradigm > completely obsolete the rc.conf concept? Were there any docs/project > pages regarding the RC effort that I could peruse for ideas? -sc No, the NetBSD paradigm doesn't obsolete the rc.conf concept at all, in fact rc.conf is still used in a functionally identical manner, though NetBSD and FreeBSD don't share a common set of variables for the file. (Though I've done some rather trivial work towards that end) The NetBSD rc.d rystem is a wonderfully simple concept. Instead of having a large rc script, that's hard to modify programmatically, you have a a collection of small scripts, each of which contains a line stating what it provides, and what it requires. An external program, rcorder, parses these small scripts, takes the PROVIDE and REQUIRE lines, and performs a topological sort, thus making it much easier to be assured that services are started in the proper order, and that all dependancies are fulfilled. The NetBSD rc.d system, does not by any means solve every problem. There's a huge class of problems, most of which also exist in the current system, which are not solved by this system. If you want to read far more than you could ever want to read on the various problems of the NetBSD system, and various bikesheds that could improve it, see the archives, circa June 2001. Please, please, please, do not make yet another attempt to expand the scope of the project into something which will not be easily implemented and accepted. If you want to see what I did back in June, nab the tarball from http://overtone.org/rc.d/ it includes my initial work, along with a rough TODO and some minor NOTES I made while doing the work. Good Luck, -Kevin Way -- Kevin Way http://www.overtone.org/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message