[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#546401: sysv-rc: Please reintroduce support for /etc/rc.boot

[Juanjo Garcia]

On Thu, Jul 28, 2011 at 11:35:42PM +0200, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
> [Juanjo Garcia]
> The /etc/rc.boot/ execution has been obsolete since 1999 and was
> dropped from sysv-rc with the upload 2009-09-05.

It may have been declared obsolete (like Bach's music
has been) but that doesn't mean it IS obsolete. And I
will explain you why, if you allow me to do so :

In any exclusively dependency-based approach, there is
simply no way to specify "I want this script to be run
AFTER all the rest, whatever the rest might be".

If there is no way left to do it, this can be considered
as a serious disadvantage -even a bug- of the new system.

Unless -of course- you apply the rc.boot idea, which
is a concept both clean and  unobstrusive, applicable
equally to dependency-based and not dependency-based
infraestructures.

> 
> Why do you not move the scripts in /etc/rc.boot/ to /etc/init.d/ and
> symlink to them from /etc/rcS.d/ or /etc/rc2.d/ instead of recreating
> support for /etc/rc.boot/?

Dirtier. Uglier. Unnecessary.

Not practical. Not elegant.

Prone to leave dangling symlinks. In general leaves more room
to errors, whether caused during human intervention or by update-rc.

Makes much more difficult to distinguish local sysadmin
configuration from package-managed scripts.

Makes configuration bloat.

>  It is my recommended way forward, and
> allow for one consistent way to handle scripts run early during boot.
> 

Of course I agree that's the way to go if
you need them to run early during boot.

... but a premise for rc.boot is that the scripts placed
there are executed (by alphabetic order) in LAST place.

> Happy hacking,
> -- 
> Petter Reinholdtsen

I am worried.
Sometimes I get the impression there's a
"fifth column" of Linux developers paid
by Microsoft to hinder its development.