On Mon, 01 Jun 2015 11:25:03 +0200
Didier Kryn <kryn@???> wrote:

>      Laurent,

>

>      I know the argument that init should be kept small to be 
> rock-solid. Does it mean that it must be written in C and not in Lua
> or Ash?

Yes. In my opinion it does. Init must be tiny, and it must be rock
solid. Lua is written in C, so it adds more "stuff" than a pure C
implementation.

>      Anyway Sysvinit is not so small, invokes a great deal of shell 
> scripts to do the job, and leaves service supervision to the admin.

:-)

A great many evils have been perpetrated based on being "better than
Sysvinit". In a few days, I will attempt to install an 89 line init
(Suckless Init), on Plop C. Now *that's* small, although to compare
apples with apples you must add daemontools-encore to the 89 lines,
because Suckless Init does no process management, so that all must be
done by daemontools-encore. And Laurent would probably point out that
what I'll be attempting has PID1 single-time running its /etc/rc script
instead of respawning it, so it's not appropriate for a real distro.
But anyway, Sysvinit should never be used as a justification for
anything.

>

>      Please take it easy. I'm not saying this would be the fastest or 
> the most secure of all init programs. But it would be a base for 
> experimentation and hacking and I think it would be pretty educative.

Now that you're talking about experimentation, you're talking *my*
language. If it's just for experimentation, yeah, write it in Lua,
write it in bash, split it into start/reap signals and process
management. Rewriting daemontools in Lua --- that would be interesting.
I personally think daemontools is more a philosophy than an
implementation.

LOL, imagine writing startup scripts in Lua. How cool would that be?

But once again, this is for experimentation only. My official position
on "real work" type computers is to do it with Epoch, runit, s6, or
secondarily with Sysvinit + Daemontools or Sysvinit + OpenRC.

One more thing. Your mileage may differ, but I've found it an order of
magnitude easier to lay down Epoch or runit on a no-systemd distro than
on a poetterized distro. So Devuan is the perfect host for *the
individual user* to decide to jumper in Epoch, runit, or s6.


SteveT

Steve Litt
June 2015 featured book: The Key to Everyday Excellence
http://www.troubleshooters.com/key