Lennart Poettering wrote:
On Mon, 07.01.08 12:35, Casey Dahlin (cjdahlin@xxxxxxxx) wrote:
Everytime I hear someone mentioning initng I get a headache.
They got almost everything wrong you can get wrong in an init
system. The kept the worst things from SysV (such as numerical
"runlevels"), and added the worst things they could find in other
people's software. Like the braindeadness to make everything a shared
object, including stuff like executing chdir(). Can you believe that?
They have a "plugin" to change a directory which consists of 100 lines
or code or so. Unbelievable...
Lennart
This is all very useful.
I am proposing a session at FUDcon to explore the options, and to
definitively pick a solution. Hopefully the following day's hackfest will
see direct effort toward implementing a solution.
"Definitively" picking a solution? Unfortunately I don't see that any
of the currently available init implementations get things
right in a way that we could "definitively" pick it.
The only one of the new systems that has good code is
Upstart. However, in my understanding it got everything hooked up the
wrong way round. I.e. instead of having other daemons contact Upstart
to start and stop services it itself hooks into all kind of
"events". A couple of RH and Novell people discussed that with Scott
at this years GUADEC conference a while back. I think we managed to
convince him that this should be changed. The result is his new
Initkit project. However, that's still in its infancy and will take
some time to be useful. This however means that now adopting Upstart
would be investing in a project that's going to be replaced soonishly
anyway. Also, Ubuntu uses Upstart mostly in SysV compatibility mode
right now.
So, in short: initng is a joke, initkit not ready yet, upstart a bit of
a moving target that's going to be replaced soon anyway. The other
systems seem to be too simple (minit, runit) or totally un-Linuxish
(SMF, launchd).
I think our safest bet for now is to stay with SysV but spice it up a
little bit with LSB headers to allow parallel startup, like Debian is
doing it now.
And then, let's wait what Scott comes up with in InitKit. Given that
he's a Canonical guy, and both RH and Novell engineers discussed
Upstart in lengths with him I hope that this is also the best bet to
get something done that is adopted by all "big three" distributions,
working a bit against the balkanization of Linux userspace.
Lennart
Fine. Let's commit to that outright, and not let ourselves sit on our
asses for another 5 years while everything blows by. I'm pushing this
forward because I'm sick of seeing the action being taken on the weakest
point of our distro consisting of a bunch of stale wiki pages.
My point in saying "definitively" is that this will not be another
mailing list thread where everyone shouts back and forth until they get
bored and then everyone forgets about the issue. I mean to ensure we
pick a goal, agree to stop bitching about it, and actually execute on it.
rrn or whatever it ends up being called exists because I asked Harald
Hoyer what needed to exist for Fedora's init system to be healed, and
then I went and made it exist. Now we don't like that solution anymore.
Great. Pick another one, and ensure it begins happening as fast as
possible. Or don't. I'll do all the work. Just don't complain when its
finished. Commit, and be done with it. It is time to set a terminal date
beyond which discussion of other solutions is no longer welcome. When we
are interested only in the implementation of that which has already been
decided. Source code or GTFO.
Fedora 9 is probably going to slip without a feature that should have
been in Fedora 8. We're supposed to be innovators, and look at how much
nothing we've done on this issue. This is absurd. I'm saying we end it now.
--CJD
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