Here's the *rest* of the comments from that particular section in the book:
It appears to me that throughout the book, the authors call a spade a spade as they see it. Debian got called on this one; trust me, RedHat gets larted far more specifically and often, and SuSE gets thwocked a time or two as well. Just because a given distribution is your favorite doesn't mean it's 100% perfect all the time, to all people.
Perhaps someone who has a copy at hand can post the URL for the errata site for the book, or dig up some email addresses for the authors. Then the people who take exception w/ their comments regarding the Debian way of doing things can discuss this w/ the authors and see what exactly, in their opinion, is wrong w/ the init scripts, etc.
"At each run level, init invokes the script /etc/init.d/rc with the new run level as an argument. Each script is responsible for finding its own configuration information, which may be in the form of other files in /etc, a subdirectory of /etc, or somwhere in the script itself.
If you're looking for the hostname of the system, it's stored in /etc/hostname, which is read by the /etc/init.d/hostname.sh script. Network interface and default gateway parameters are stored in /etc/network/interfaces, which is read by the ifup command called from /etc/init.d/networking Some network options can also be set in /etc/network options.
Good luck."
The section that the OP included goes immediately in front of the portion I've included. What I get from the *context* of the whole thing is that the authors, being experienced system administrators, would rather the system configuration information be kept in one location, whether it's in one file, such as /etc/rc.config or /etc/rc.config.d under SuSE, or /etc/sysconfig/ under RedHat. I don't think any distro has *all* of it's config information in one place, probably due mainly to compatibility w/ various software that's not necessarily written w/ that one distro in mind.
Does the Debian method work? Obviously, yes. Is it perfect? Probably not. Is it better or worse than SuSE or RedHat, I think that's a personal preference. For those of you who seem to take such offense to the notion, here's the email addresses listed in the book for the authors:
Evi Nemeth [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Garth Snyder [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Trent R. Hein [EMAIL PROTECTED]
The website for the books is at www.admin.com
Enjoy,
Monte
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