Rainer Weikusat <rainerweikusat@???> wrote:

> I was specifically writing about using comment-syntax of programming
> language A to embedd programming language B code into an 'A'
> file. That's what I called 'a travesty' because of the double issue of
> overloading comments with formal meaning and because the information is
> of no use to someone looking at the installed script.
>
> #! is an entirely different animal because the information is needed for
> running the script, it's also useful to someone looking at the script
> code as it documents which interpreter is supposed to execute it and
> it's really a 16-byte number supposed to conform to a convention how
> older UNIX(*) kernels detected that a file was indeed an executable and
> the type of it. It presumably doubles up as 'shell comment' to be
> somewhat portable to systems without this feature where the shell just
> tries to execute anything the kernel cannot.
>
> But the 'LSB headers' were designed from scratch.

Well yes, I do agree with you. If we didn't start from here, it wouldn't be a good system to adopt.

But, from the starting point of "here", where init scripts are (msotly) shell scripts, and there's a large installed base, and you need a system that will co-exist with systems that aren't using the "new system" (whether that's "yet" or "not at all") ...
What would you propose ?

I'm not trying to be argumentative, but I'm genuinely interested as to what alternatives you can see that don't break what's already there - because I can only see see one* which (IMO) isn't really significantly better. And lets face it, a not insignificant part of the argument against systemd is the way it just "breaks what used to work just fine" in the quest for improvements.


* A separate new file containing the LSB definitions - which to a certain extent is just adding more cruft, but in a separate file.