> For instance you refer to /sbin/rc as the way to change from > one runlevel to another, yet 'man rc' shows nothing. Whereas > a 'man telinit' on gentoo does give a description of a program > claiming to be the correct way to change runlevel...
Documentation (and man pages in general) are typically out of sync with the actual development efforts. Many open source projects have hoards of developers that want to contribute yet many projects are begging for documentation folks. > Plus it isn't clear to me from any docs I can find if /sbin/rc expects > a text or numeric runlevel argument. At least telinit is > well documented... > > If /sbin/rc is the way to do it, why is it not documented in the manual?? > If telenit is not the way to do it, why is it in the manual?? I'm sure the gentoo developers would like a hand extending the documentation to include such information. But realistically I think you're making a mountain out of a molehill. I have two runlevels, default and console. I can either use the softlevel at boot or change the runlevel in /etc/inittab, or both. But who really changes runlevels frequently? I don't. My boxen come up under the runlevel I assign and they stay up. There's no need to change runlevels on a frequent basis. As to complaining about the lack of info in the man pages, I'm much happier that the gentoo folks are focusing their efforts on portions of the gentoo system that need it, rather than burning cycles on a man page that would hardly be needed 99% of the time. > And why specify the runlevel by name at boot, and by number in inittab? > > Fudging things by just making the name equal the runlevel number just > introduces a source of potential confusion. A bit like having some file > commands use name, and others using inode number. Sure you could suggest > that all file names be made equal to the text representation of the inode > number, but that would hardly be an elegant solution and would defeat the > purpose of having text names... It is much better to have all system calls > work on names and keep the inodes internal - as is done. So it's different than BSD. Big deal. It's only one of many differences between gentoo and BSD/other linux distros. If you don't like it, you're welcome to either a) submit changes or b) use another distro that's more to your liking. But complaining about portions of gentoo that aren't like BSD doesn't help anyone. -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
