On Fri, Jun 17, 2016 at 02:14:10PM -0400, Steve Litt wrote:
> On Fri, 17 Jun 2016 15:31:28 +0200
> Irrwahn <irrwahn@???> wrote:
>
> > As for the educational value: I fail to see what good does learning
> > things already proven wrong.
>
> I don't know what got proven wrong, but as a result of this thread, the
> average DNG inhabitant now knows as much about init as I, the author
> of Manjaro Experiments. The average DNG inhabitant who has been
> following along with this thread can now hold his own on the
> supervision@??? list, and that's something quite
> impressive. I'd say this has been of tremendous educational value. I
> know I've been educated.
>

I am sorry to look harsh here, but what the DNG list might have
"learned" from this "experiment" is just to create a process which
forks a child and wait forever for its children and grand-children to
die, to reap them properly. This has little to do with init systems
for unix, except for the fact that the initialisation of a unix
systems needs at least one process that waits to reap dead children,
like those 10 lines of code do.

And the "fantastic mechanism" contained in those 10 lines of code is
not specific of "init" at all, since it is normally used by any
program that spawns other processes to "do things" and reap them
properly when they die (just to make some examples, web servers, mail
servers, my mutt client which called emacs to let me compose this
message, the shell that I used to launch mutt which waits for mutt
which waits for emacs, and so on...). Waiting for the death of spawned
children is not an esoteric practice, but should instead be *the norm*
for any process that spawns a child.

Unfortunately, system initialisation is really a bit more complicated
than that, whether you like it or not.

HND

KatolaZ

-- 
[ ~.,_  Enzo Nicosia aka KatolaZ - GLUGCT -- Freaknet Medialab  ]  
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