UNIX admin writes: > I'm currently wading through documentation on how to write my own XML manifes > t and have it automatically imported at boot time. > > Naturally I first turned to docs.sun.com; but this time around, I got the "sh > ort end of the stick". > > Unless I'm severely mistaken, there is currently no one single document that > guides the sysadmin or a package developer through, and explains step by step > , how to write an XML manifest and have it imported by the system.
True. The document you found (also linked from the SMF community) is probably the closest. There are a couple 'example' documents out there that are pretty good too, but we need to do a better job of collecting both the completest documentation (everything you can do) with quick and easy examples of how to get what you need done. We'll publish early versions here. > > The documentation is strewn all over the internet, and what documentation the > re is, is in my opinion severely convoluted and hard to comprehend as a whole > . > > Here is one of my favorite *convoluted* examples on SMF, taken from > > "BigAdmin System Administration Portal > Predictive Self-Healing > > Solaris Service Management Facility - Service Developer Introduction" > [http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/content/selfheal/sdev_intro.html] > > The pasus in question is: > > "Instance versus service split > > ... > > If your service may be implemented differently (e.g. 'smtp' may be implemente > d by sendmail, postfix, qmail, ...) by a different instance, you should locat > e the properties that are specific to the current implementation at the insta > nce, not the service." > > Now, I'm no beginner; I know System V startup and shutdown like the back of m > y hand and have written *many* *portable* System V init.d scripts. Incomprehensibility of this doc falls squarely on my head, so I apologize for any confusion it caused. This is a part of SMF that has more capabilities than init.d scripts. Peter Tribble has written an excellent postfix service which is an example of this usage. It allows services which require 'an smtp server' to depend on svc:/network/smtp, rather than depending on svc:/network/smtp:sendmail or svc:network/smtp:postfix. So The other example we often use is a web server (or a soon to come app server in N1) -- often webserver configuration is the same across a number of servers, except that they run on different ports with different DocumentRoots. You could have a service which stores the common config at the service level and during configuration simply override the instance-specific config on the instance. Perhaps the biggest problem is that this isn't so much introductory material. You don't need to know it for your first service, and it should be organized towards the end of the document. I'll try to spend some time reorganizing this document early next week and send out a draft for review to this community. Any comments you have on improvements beyond what I said here would be greatly appreciated. > > But the example above couldn't be more confusing or convoluted as far as I'm > concerned. Needless to say, the documentation on SMF and XML manifests is ch > oke full of such examples! > > The big concern is also that there is really no one-stop-shop step-by-step gu > ide on docs.sun.com. And yet, the documentation on properly integrating your > services into SMF is simply critical! The document you reference above is supposed to be the beginning of what we integrate into docs.sun.com, so constructive comments you have on its comprehensibility are greatly appreciated. liane -- Liane Praza, Solaris Kernel Development liane.praza at sun.com - http://blogs.sun.com/lianep
