On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 6:59 AM, James Carlson <james.d.carlson at sun.com> wrote: > Ceri Davies writes: >> I'd like to see bug 6296119 reopened, or an explanation of why the above >> isn't considered a defect, and then I'd like to request that someone >> sponsor me via the request-sponsor program to fix it. > > Perhaps it could reasonably be considered an RFE, as long as the > person working on it realizes that such a fix will have some fairly > annoying portability issues. In particular, any software designed to > take advantage of it won't work right on older versions of Solaris > and, after all, isn't that the _ONLY_ valid reason to be delivering an > rc script rather than an SMF service?
There are already annoying portability issues. I'm sure someone will correct me if my fuzzy memory is wrong. - HPUX uses three-digit numbers for ordering. - RHEL does not impose that it is a /bin/sh script - /bin/sh has become ksh93 - The (legacy) Solaris /bin/sh does not support features that most other /bin/sh implementations do. > (I wouldn't bother with an enhancement like this, precisely because > it's just a compatibility feature, and because nothing new should have > these scripts.) I would expect that Sun's priority would be to make it so that there is a tool (command line and gui) to easily add a service. svccfg in its current form is not it. I've worked with some reasonably good sysadmins and application admins that have not been able to make the transition which is largely seen as extra work that is hard to do with little or no benefit (that is immediately apparent to them). There are several things about adding a service to SMF that are confusing: - No other part of Solaris has configuration files in /var. IMHO this is a bug. - Solaris puts all of its service commands in /lib/svc/method. Where should I put mine? - XML is not a language that most people (especially non-programmers) find intuitive - If someone makes it as far as reading the DTD to try to get hints, it is difficult to read as well. This goes back to XML is not an easy language for most people. - "svccfg validate" does not give terribly helpful error messages. - svccfg feels more like working in a debugger designed 20 years ago than an administrative interface to a key feature developed in the past few years. For the trivial case of "start this in muti-user mode", SMF is way hard to use. I understand the benefits of SMF and am quite capable of and am (almost always) quite happy using it. I have, however, had limited success in getting others to make use of it when adding new services for the reasons I outline above. -- Mike Gerdts http://mgerdts.blogspot.com/
