On 31 July 2013, at 20:28, Alan McKinnon wrote: >> >> Right, which is a bit freakin' odd, because on most every previous distro >> and other *nix system, that's where the system administrator goes to start >> and stop services. >> >> If they're not used, in this case, I don't think they should be installed. >> >> /etc/init.d is wholly different from /usr/share/package-name/examples >> >> There are many other directories on the system where it's no problem to have >> some idle, unused, "wasted" files, but /etc/init.d has long been an >> important directory. > > True, but this one is an oddity. The ebuild for the daemon installs > those files, and the ebuild doesn't know when you change your mind about > a service manager. If you omitted the init scripts, you get to remerge > all your daemon packages just to get them. Yuck.
In general, and personally, I would regard that as an acceptable compromise, for a migration that only needs to be carried out once. Each month we might upgrade numerous packages on our Gentoo systems, I don't think it's that ugly to reinstall a few packages just once for something major like this. On a binary distro this doesn't arise because they say "we'll be sticking with init.d throughout 10.x, and with 11.0 we'll start using systemd". In Gentoo my objections are rendered moot by Canek's explanation that systemd replaces the init.d function helpers with a message that says "hey, init.d isn't used by this system", so that those scripts exit gracefully. I find this quite an elegant migration path. Stroller.
