Simon Hobson <linux@???> writes:
> 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.

[...]

>> 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") ...

Non of this requires 'dependency information' to be inserted as comment
block into a script supposed to start or stop something (that this
effectively means 'init.d commands' must be implemented in languages
supporting #-comments was probably another unintended side effect of
this "Houston, we have a file! Can't we put some more stuff into it?"
approach).

> What would you propose ?

Continue the fine practice of uniformly starting and stopping everything
at a default policy of "20", IOW, in parallell. Software is supposed to
solve technical problems, not to work around people's mental
deficiencies (such as the inability to understand that 'X was true a
second ago' doesn't imply anything about 'X' right now or at any other
time in future).

NB: I suggest that anyone who believes that I made this up spends some
time observing movements of people in the street, specifically, how
often they run (or almost run) into things because they assumed them to
be static while they were actually moving. This is a really common
trait.

> 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.

I consider this a much better idea for implementing such a system.