On Fri, Jun 17, 2016 at 03:02:54PM -0400, Steve Litt wrote:
> KatolaZ <katolaz@???> wrote:
>

[cut]

> > 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.
>
> Call runit or s6 from the forked child, create a shutdown script, and
> you pretty much have a system that can boot and shut down without
> requiring journal restores or fscks. A practical system that you can
> work with.
>

Well, if your definition of "initialisation" is just "getting
something that can boot and shut down without requiring journal
restores or fsck", then I don't see why Edward is calling rc from his
script, instead than just a shell.

The truth is that you need somebody that mounts filesystems, invites
syslog, cron, and a few more guys to the party, loads all the modules
you need to actually use your hardware, configures a bit of the
hardware you got, sets the locale, sets the keyboard layout to your
preferred one, and so on and so forth. This is what is normally called
an "init system", which is the guy that takes care of getting the
system in such a state that allows you to use it *comfortably*,
without the need to manually replay the configuration again and again,
at each reboot.

Then you can provide any other alternative definition of "init
system", but if there is no procedure that does those things for you,
then you have to manually do those tasks, at each reboot. In that case
the 12-lines init might just spawn a shell which prints the message
"Now go on Steve, work your way through it since I am a minimal init",
and you will become an essential component of the human-init ;)

HND

KatolaZ

-- 
[ ~.,_  Enzo Nicosia aka KatolaZ - GLUGCT -- Freaknet Medialab  ]  
[     "+.  katolaz [at] freaknet.org --- katolaz [at] yahoo.it  ]
[       @)   http://kalos.mine.nu ---  Devuan GNU + Linux User  ]
[     @@)  http://maths.qmul.ac.uk/~vnicosia --  GPG: 0B5F062F  ] 
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