Re: hurd-init

[Mo McKinlay <mmckinlay@gnu.org>]

[ snip: Interesting discussion about the merits of init scripts on HURD ]

The beauty of hurd-init's design is that you don't actually need scripts
in a lot of cases. If a 'service' is just a single command to start
up/shut down, then you can reduce it to a small package config file (4-5
lines, at most). While it's not necessary to do so in some cases, and
would be redundant with SysV-style init, you can tie translators to
dependencies with hurd-init, and provide a single interface ('svc') to
starting/stopping subsystems, be they daemons, translators or something
else. This way, the user doesn't have to remember many different commands
to perform the effectively the same task with different subsystems,
without adding unnecessary complexity. I think :)

-- 
Mo McKinlay             Chief Software Architect          inter/open Labs
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GnuPG Key: pub  1024D/76A275F9 2000-07-22 Mo McKinlay <mmckinlay@gnu.org>