Hi all,

I recently answered a runit subject post, and I just want to make it
clear what I am and am not recommending.

I'm not recommending that runit (or any other init) become Devuan's
default init. That decision must be made by people with way more
brains, information, and skin in the game than I.

I'm not recommending that a runit package be made: I'm neither good
enough at apt-get nor do I have the time to make such a package. Also,
I tend to believe that simple inits are better built
with ./configure;make;make install than via a package. My belief isn't
shared by many, and in fact my belief might be disfunctional, but a
person with my belief has no business being part of a package for a
small init.

There's a similar init system called s6. I like runit better because
it's simpler. S6 is more featureful, maleable and robust. Both are
simple enough. Both are featureful, maleable and robust enough. I could
argue the merits of either over the merits of the other.

The reason I offered help on runit but not s6 is I have much more
experience and knowledge with runit.

The runit install docs recommend untarring the tarball into /package,
and recommend that the symlink directory be /service. These choices
will enrage many admins, and are unnecessary. You can untar the runit
tarball anywhere you want: even something like $HOME/systemd_killer.
When they tell you to do /package/compile, you cd to
$HOME/systemd_killer/admin/runit-2.1.2, and then do ./package/compile.

Instead of doing ./package/install like the instructions suggest,
do ./package/compile, ./package/check, and then manually copy the
executables in ./package/command into /usr/local/bin. Do whatever must
be done to transfer everything in $HOME/admin/runit-2.1.2/man to where
it belongs in the /usr/local man system.

As far as /service, I use /var/service. All that needs to be changed
is to call runsvdir with argument /var/service instead of /service.

If you want to have runlevels, here's the page that tells about that:

http://smarden.org/runit/runlevels.html

The head of the doc tree is at:

http://smarden.org/runit/index.html

My personal opinion is rather than packaging runit, s6, Epoch and the
like, we should document a preferred way to install them in Devuan. I
can help. And if they ever do get packaged, I hope the hell their
packages don't de-install each other.

SteveT

Steve Litt
May 2017 featured book: Twenty Eight Tales of Troubleshooting
http://www.troubleshooters.com/28