Peter Tribble wrote: > I hadn't thought of sticking a dependency in like that. It would > almost work, but it doesn't quite make it - while it might allow > them to run, it doesn't guarantee that they're all in the desired > state. (In other words, if one service is disabled, this trick won't > enable it.)
Indeed. It's a clever way to have a single service control a flock of others, but it doesn't repair them if they're individually in trouble one way or another. Another thing it doesn't do is to let you synchronously know when all of the services are up. Enable -s on the "control" service finishes immediately, since that service doesn't itself depend on anything else coming up. Another related trick is to have a service that depends _on_ all of your services, and then use "enable -r" to enable all of them. That will support synchronous operations, but doesn't immediately offer a way to turn them off. You can combine the two to get both an "on" control and an "off" control, but having two different services for the purpose is at least a bit weird.
