On Wed, Jun 17, 2015 at 11:25:28AM -0400, Steve Litt wrote:

[cut]

>
> What you say above is true. And what you say above is a catastrophe,
> because sysvinit scripts are so crazy complicated that it's useless for
> a mere mortal to understand them. The same is true of OpenRC init
> scripts.

Maybe the caveman inside me is speaking on my behalf, but I honestly
can't see all this "crazy complicated"ness in sysvinit scripts. Again,
what are we talking about?

If I do a few quick "wc -l" on my /etc/init.d I get a total of 68
files. Most of them are just ancillary sets of functions (plus a
skeleton and a readme), needed by no more than 30 real init scripts in
total. Of those 30 scripts, 18 have less than 100 lines, including
comments. If we ignore comments and blank lines, the average number of
lines per script is just 73, with a median of 57 lines. The "longest"
script is nfs-common, which reduces to 232 lines of shell code, when
one strips comments and blank lines.

Since we are talking so much about "the average user", can you please
tell me when on earth such an "average user" really needs to modify an
existing sysvinit script? If he does need to do so, he is no more an
"average user" but a sysadmin, and system administration is a serious
thing, which requires skills and experience. And if you have
experience as a sysadmin, in 99% of the cases you are perfectly able
to read and understand those 57 lines of shell code. Especially
because, if you are a sysadmin you don't want to have
yet-another-scripting-language just for init scripts. And if you use
another language for init scripts you still have to learn it,
anyway...

My2Cents

KatolaZ

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[ Enzo Nicosia aka KatolaZ --- GLUG Catania -- Freaknet Medialab ]
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