On 2/19/03 10:56 PM, "Phil Barnett" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Perhaps this is true, but if you can admit that you are more likely to have a > room full of RH servers than a room full of Gentoo or any other distro > servers, you are on the way to my point. And, this mythical room full of > servers is statistically proven. RH has more servers out there.
Yes, but it's not going to be like that everywhere. For instance, the machine room at my work is a room full of Solaris boxes with a few Linux boxes that are being phased out. In this situation, it makes far more sense to adopt Solaris-style abstractions on the Linux boxes, not the other way around. The point is that different situations will have very different requirements. The whole point of Gentoo is to be configurable, almost nothing is forced onto the user. With this in mind, no abstraction layer from another OS or distro should be included by default, no matter how common that OS or distro is. However, that's not to say that these abstractions shouldn't be available to install if you want them. Someone already suggested making an ebuild for service. Someone could take that even further to make a rh-emu package that brings over even more RH features. It should even be possible to have that script structure the init scripts to behave the same way as RH does. Personally though, I came to Gentoo to get away from Redhat and Mandrake (primarily because of rpm). > I don't have any problems with that, but everyone here is biased. The fact is > that there are more RH servers out there than any other single distro. With > that said, I do see that RH has symlinked /etc/init.d to /etc/rc.d/init.d. > > Didn't know that was there. Learned RH long before that. I just checked my copy of O'Reilly's "Essential System Administration" (mine's the 1995 edition) which shows the directory structure for System V init to have /etc/init.d, not /etc/rc.d/init.d. This again sounds like a case of RH adopting a non-standard behaviour, however a symlink lets you have it both ways. On a quick skim through the System V init section the major variation seems to be certain Unices installing the rc structure in /sbin instead of /etc, I don't see any mention of /etc/rc.d/init.d/. I started using RH 4.2 back in 96 and I seem to recall it being /etc/init.d but that's really taking me back. I might still be able to track down a box that's running 4.2 or 5 to check (I know I can track down a 4.2 install disk if I'm really stuck, should just be able to check the files for the sysvinit rpm). > Exactly, and it's not just in RH by the way. At any rate, that service script > is already on more servers that you give credit for. Hence my suggestion above that it be an option. By your logic, Gentoo (and any other Linux) should really behave more like a Windows box because there's far more Windows boxes than Linux boxes. We should be using \ instead of / for directory paths for instance. I'm not saying that you shouldn't be able to do it the way you're used to. I'm just saying that it shouldn't effect the way I work. The whole point is to have choice. > Well, it's been my desktop for about 6 months and I'm doing just fine with it. > I just miss the service abstraction that I've become used to from several > other distros. > > And, yes, I can put it there. But, being such a small script and being as > widely used as it is, I don't see any reason for it to not be in there. There > are literally dozens of other abstractions that we all take for granted in > nearly every distro. This is just another one. Yes, but by the same argument you could complain that Gentoo doesn't even install a kernel, logger, cron daemon, or boot loader by default. These are all things that nearly every distro includes but aren't included with Gentoo. Like I said above, the point of Gentoo is to be configurable. Make the modifications you want. If you think enough other people could use them as well, then make a package for them (or find someone who will). But there is also a point where you do have to ask why you're using distro X modified to behave like distro Y instead of just installing distro Y. If every distro behaved the same way, there'd be no reason to have more than one distro. The big question is which distro gets you the closest to what you want and allows you to setup as much of the rest as possible. For some people, RH (or another distro) does most of what they want, perhaps with some modification. For others, Gentoo is more what the want but they might still want to modify it to work the way they like. Personally, I took one look at Gentoo's init structure and was sold. I always found it to be a pain when I had to create a new init script in RH or Mandrake and then add it to the runlevels I wanted (although maybe I was missing an abstraction layer that was there). With Gentoo, you just setup the dependencies and rc-update figures out the rest. Granted, it does sound like you ran into a problem with a complicated network setup where having a single script for starting your network would be better than separate scripts. In general though, I do prefer having separate scripts. -- Andrew "Frugal" Dacey [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.tildefrugal.net/ -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
