Marc Haber <mh+debian-de...@zugschlus.de> writes: > Russ Allbery <r...@debian.org> wrote:
>> I'm happy to provide both, integrate patches, etc., although I think >> init scripts are awful and my level of personal motivation to work on >> init scripts compared to anything else (whether it be systemd or >> upstart or whatever else someone might invent) is quite low. > That is one of my concerns: Once Debian GNU/Linux has systemd as > default, noone will an longer provide init scripts, let alone tested > init scripts, which will severely hurt non-Linux kernels in Debian. Yes, that's one of the risks of not managing to port one of the other init systems to non-Linux kernels. We are, in general, not going to get people to work on things they don't want to work on, and init scripts are awful and long-overdue for being replaced. I think some of the burden is going to have to be born by the Debian porters for platforms for which there's currently nothing better available, whether by porting something better, developing some conversion process for one of the other formats, or maintaining the init scripts in other packages and submitting patches. I will promise to review and integrate such patches promptly, similar to how I've tried to review and integrate patches for Hurd support. Using an imperative language for a descriptive purpose is a bad mismatch of tools and has been ever since the practical effect of init scripts has become fairly standardized. We need to switch to a descriptive language; we will gain huge maintainability benefits and will have far fewer bugs of the type that have plagued init scripts for decades: bad shell error handling, incorrect handling of unusual cases involving half-stopped daemons, inconsistent PID handling, stopping unrelated binaries with the same executable name, and so on, all of which are avoidable but only if you're very careful and know what you're doing or get lucky when translating opaque and obscure templates. I definitely do *not* agree with breaking systems that use shell init scripts proactively, but shell init scripts are so inferior to any descriptive replacement that I agree with you they're likely to bitrot if left solely to the maintenance of the average Debian packager, who will probably quickly embrace something easier to maintain and stop paying attention to them. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87fvx54kdq....@windlord.stanford.edu