Re: /var/run/

On Fri, Jan 05, 2007 at 11:22:51AM -0600, Scott Walde wrote:

>>What's wrong with init? What doesn't it do well?
>>
>>
<snip lots of valid issues>

Thanks for all the good reasons. I guess I've just never had to deal
with the shortcomings of init. If I'm adding a package, the script gets
added. If I'm adding something from source, I edit skeleton, and it
doesn't take much effort to get things going. That, and I reboot so
rarely, that shaving a few seconds, or even minutes isn't going to be a
big sell for me. If I need to stop, start, or restart a service I use
'/etc/init.d/service start|stop|restart'

That said, I was mostly just ignoring the upstart talk until I read
(Conrad's?) bit about the finished version containing replacements for
cron/at/anacron/inet. That's the bit that caught my eye and got me a
little bothered.

>>It seems to me that Upstart is running contrary to the basic philosophy
>>of Unix:
>>
>>(i) Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh
>>rather than complicate old programs by adding new features.
>>- Doug McIlroy (/The Bell System Technical Journal)
>>
>>
>
>That much I'll agree with. Having a single good and simple system to
>manage jobs from boot would be a good thing. Adding cron/at or inetd to
>the mix just doesn't make any sense.
>
>
Thanks, Bruce, for being the only(?) response that actually addressed
that part of my comment.

Maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm getting old and crusty. Maybe I just
don't like change. But, it seems to me like many of the people that are
newer to Linux/Unix, particularly people who prefer the gui to the
command line, have either never heard, don't understand, or have
forgotten the beauty of small, simple programs connected with simple
communications. (pipes) I love being able to do stuff like:
$ du -sk *|sort -rn|head

Sure, sorting could have been added to du. I suppose "only return the
top n results" could have been added too, but then you'd have to
duplicate that functionality in any program I might want to sort, or
only return the top n results. Oh well, if you got this far, you're
probably in the choir, eh?

If anyone who got this far is interested in some of the philosophy
behind Unix design, there's an interesting read at:
http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch01s06.html

ttyl
srw
Received on Fri Jan 5 22:26:11 2007