On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 3:01 PM, Fabio Erculiani <lx...@gentoo.org> wrote: > Not all the Gentoo users are as skilled as you (a developer). Having a > programmatic, bootloader agnostic way to swap /sbin/init is useful for > the reasons I explained. Yet I haven't read any solid reason not to do > that.
Well, there is no reason that an eselect module couldn't edit the boot configuration, but not with the current way that everybody generates them manually anyway. Keep in mind that any Gentoo user who can't edit a boot loader configuration is limited to booting from LiveCDs. The bootloader is installed and configured manually in Gentoo, following the handbook. Running openrc and systemd in parallel under grub legacy (the config anybody without more exotic requirements and knowledge uses) is just a matter of duplicating a few lines of the config file, renaming the menu item name, and setting init= on one of them. Now you can boot into either from the boot menu. As I mentioned before on this list I'm all for having some packages that actually install a working default kernel, initramfs, boot config, etc. They might even be part of a profile, so that if a user eselects that profile at install-time and does an emerge -uDN world they can then just type reboot when it finishes and get a working system. However, none of that exists now. If it did exist, then manipulating those standardized files via eselect would be quite possible as well (most likely the boot config would be built from some kind of conf.d directory with a script that updates it when needed, and eselect and other packages coudl dump stuff in that conf.d directory as needed just as we do with env.d and so on). I should probably take a few minutes to learn how all this was implemented in Sabayon as it is likely a solved problem. Of course, the handbook would just list this as another option and gentoo-sources and such would never go away. Rich
