I can sympathise to an extent with your sentiments. SuSE Linux also embeds dependency information into their init scripts. For instance the script for xdm contains: ### BEGIN INIT INFO # Provides: xdm # Required-Start: $remote_fs $syslog ypbind # Required-Stop: # Default-Start: 5 # Default-Stop: # Description: X Display Manager ### END INIT INFO
Clearly in the SuSE case the logic is so that nieve users can add and remove scripts using the yast2 GUI administration tool, knowing little about the scripts they are adding/removing, or the other scripts that are in place. I suppose the gentoo reasoning is similar, along the lines of most people just add/remove scripts that came from elsewhere, with only a small minority actually having to grapple with writing them... For me it was something of a pain when it came to adding custom services to a SuSE linux system, because it was really hard to find any documentation on exactly what the format of those magic comments was. The only was to find out was trawling through reams of perl code used by the GUI.... I'm not sure yet that I see the benefit of the extra layer of indirection implied by the numeric->alpha mapping in gentoo, but I will try to be open minded till I get more experience with it.. Regards, DigbyT On Mon, Mar 28, 2005 at 07:59:25AM -0500, Jerry McBride wrote: > On Monday 28 March 2005 06:11 am, Digby Tarvin wrote: > > Here is another basic gentoo newbie question - what is the logic > > behind the way runlevels work in gentoo?? > > > > ---snip--- > > By now you've found the docs at gentoo.org... So I'll just be offering my > opinion to this thread. > > (...one second while I don my flame proof shorts...) > While many tout the current runlevel scheme as one of the strengths of > gentoo. > I on the other hand point out that this is one of gentoo's weaknesses. > Breaking away from a more traditional sysv runlevel logic, relying instead on > dependencies IN the startup scripts is... well.. not logical and can be > downright confusing. Gentoo is the only distribution that I've used that does > this madness. If it were an easy task to rip it out and pop a more > traditional runlevel scheme in it's place... I would jump at it. I've looked > into doing it myself at one time.I even had some success, but like everyone > else on this list, I have to work too. But it's doable, maybe even via an > ebuild too. > > (now to moderate the flames) > That said, Gentoo has been the most rewarding linux distribution I've > discovered and I use it in nearly 99% of my linux solutions. > > Cheers. > > -- > > ****************************************************************************** > Registered Linux User Number 185956 > FSF Associate Member number 2340 since 05/20/2004 > Join me in chat at #linux-users on irc.freenode.net > Buy an Xbox for $149.00, run linux on it and Microsoft loses $150.00! > 7:32am up 169 days, 15:18, 8 users, load average: 0.10, 0.14, 0.09 > -- > [email protected] mailing list -- Digby R. S. Tarvin [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.digbyt.com -- [email protected] mailing list
