On Thu, Feb 20, 2003 at 12:39:51PM -0500, Phil Barnett wrote:
> >
> > Gentoo does not care for the whole linux community "larry the cow" was
> > frustrated with the state of the current distributions (very possibly RH
> > since as you noted it's majority) he found the functionality he wanted
> > instead of the functionailty THEY WANTED YOU TO HAVE.
>
> This is not bad functionality. It's simplicity. Simplicity is good no matter
> where it comes from.
As others have asked, how is
service foo start
simpler than
/etc/init.d/foo start
?
Fewer characters to type?
So that's point one; I, and others, don't understand what one really
gains by adding the RedHat stuff (which I think actually traces its
lineage to IRIX, and boy am I glad I didn't grow to depend on their
extensions to Unix given where they're headed now, but I digress).
But a lot of people cut their teeth on RedHat, so people like me can
scream all we want about how important it is to learn the general case
(init.d/foo start|stop), there will still be people who show up not
knowing anything other than "service start|stop" -- and chkconfig
instead of the more abstract "runlevels with links to general-purpose
scripts".
Fine. There's a problem here: we (well, somebody) would like Gentoo to
have the capacity to emulate the RedHat/IRIX way of doing things.
Well, in the time this little pissing contest has been going on, I've
learned a fair amount about how the Debian packaging system works. I'm
already passing literate (if far from fluent) in the nuts and bolts of
the ebuild system. In a few more hours I expect to be able to start
distributing Debian packages ('cuz that's what we run here at work) to
my own couple hundred machines so that my users can have the things they
expect which aren't in Debian, without us having to trot around to all
our boxen individually.
All of which is just a roundabout way of saying that if you want
something, and you can't convince anybody else to do it, there's really
nothing stopping you from doing it yourself. These packaging systems
are not all that hard to learn -- not trivial maybe, but I'm no Einstein
and I'm doing it. Maybe your "rh-compat" package won't make it into the
main Gentoo archive (or maybe it will), but it'll be in your own, and
maybe others will link to you and then they'll have it.
And who knows, if you write a good enough initialization compatibility
package, one that really /does/ add a layer of abstraction rather than
just a shorter euphamism for the existing SysV stuff, you might actually
have something that /could/ be ported to a BSD-style system as well as
the various diverging traditions of SysV. So yeah, Gentoo reinvented
the wheel. I like their new wheel; but if for some reason I had to run
OpenBSD and FreeBSD and IRIX and RedHat and Gentoo /and/ I had to run
them all to do more or less the same set of stuff (dear lord), I could
install the "MetaInit" package on all of them and from now on I no longer
have to know where I'm sitting before I start apache, I just run "service
apache start" and I'm off to the next task.
Well, unless the machine I'm on calls apache "httpd" or "webserver" in
which case... oh never mind.
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