Darren Reed wrote: > On the one hand, you've got the people who will potentially be using > the "start" saying you're not going to deliver what they need to and > on the other you've got the implementors/designers of SMF who seem > somewhat supportive.
Perhaps it just went over my head, but I think the "ignore dependencies" variant is newly introduced today. I agree that it's very useful, perhaps even critical, but at the same time it must be made very clear that it is a power tool with sharp edges and few safety guards. For that reason I'd suggest that it should be an option on some other command, rather than a top-level verb on its own. Nicolas Williams wrote: > At a glance I want to know: a) will this service start at next boot, b) > is it running now. And I want to be able to change those two things > independently. Perhaps, but one of the things that the SMF designers decided (and I agree) is that controlling those two things independently (as is traditional on UNIX) is the source of many problems, and so they deliberately made it *not* the simple case. The simple case is that there's a single switch where ON means "running, now and forever" and OFF means "not running, now and forever". I don't mind the idea of independent control over the two underlying switches, but as above I do think that it needs to be made very clear that this is an advanced option, and so I don't think a simple top-level verb is appropriate. (This is reasonably consistent with Windows. The start/stop and enable/disable switches that you describe are visible only in the Services tool, an advanced tool. The base tools in the Control Panel offer only single-switch on-off choices.)
